Adobe XD Test Drive

I recently needed to create wireframes for a project and decided to take Adobe XD (also known as Adobe Experience Design) for a spin. Here are my “play-by-play” impressions. *

*note: Some of the issues in this article were addressed by Adobe in recent patches. I wrote the original version of this article several months ago for a user experience group

Overall impressions while working

I took some quick notes while working and right after of what I experienced while using Adobe XD.

• I really liked the repeat grid – it was very easy to use and saved me a lot of time.
• Drag and drop photos from computer into a shape worked ok. (question – are the photos optimized? does it matter?)
• The photo drag and drop into a shape had a negative side though – it did not let you edit the “mask” after dropping in, which means cropping the photo before you use it.
• Editing text was OK but would have liked some type of easier layer management like Sketch.
• The “pink space adjustment” was not quite intuitive. It took a moment for me to understand I needed to finish doing my repeats then click in the space between one of the repeated items to adjust. (Question: what if you need to keep a specific padding in place? – Ah you can edit that in the tool bar on the right.)
• The zooming did not work quite right initially when I tried command 3, but the touchpad did. It could be custom settings I have for other applications, but I found it awkward.
• I would like better feedback on padding of outer area as I work / do alignment
• The “select by art board name” was not quick for me. Art board name always exposed as a possible solution?
• Lack of glyphs / font glyph support was a big pain point since internally there is a special UI set we use for these. I have a glyph font set in all other Adobe tools, but it refused to work in XD.
• Grabbing objects behind other objects was a bit of a time suck.
• Prototype mode: The linking was pretty easy, but disconcerting when it “disappeared” when I clicked away. How can I easily see what is linked and what is not? Is there a dimmed/alternate view to show what is linked?
• Prototype mode: Creating video – super easy. Pro tip: The video recording starts on the art board you have selected.
• Not being able to separate guidelines that come with the default templates out from the rest of the mockup is irritating.
• Why do I have to choose mobile or desktop or whatever? Sometimes I need to work on all three or other form factors side by side.
• Easy to export to PDF
• Need a way to link the movie to the PDF so people know it exists.
• Needs better integration with Illustrator via an export function in Illustrator or an import function or better Libraries support.

Con vs. Balsamiq:

• XD suffers from not having a preset menu of tools/widgets that are always there.
• It does come with Google Materials and iOS prepackaged, which is nice, but sometimes I just need to quickly throw down some widgets that aren’t too polished.

Cons vs. Sketch

• I like the layers in Sketch. Sometimes my wireframes or mockups end up having a lot of layers or sections and I want to organize and move things around.
• Sketch has better font support
• Sketch gives me full control of masking

Conclusion

I’ve also used the iPad Pro version of Adobe Comp CC and it has some features similar to Balsamiq that I would love to see in the desktop version of XD. It looks like there is an app version of XD so I need to test that out and see what differences there are.

Overall pretty nice. I am going to use it for a few more projects and see how that goes.

Similar to Invision app about a year ago.  I did not try to preview on my phone, so I need to test that next.