May Update of Adobe Experience Design CC

Delivering Progress on 3 Most Requested Features

On behalf of the whole XD team at Adobe, I’m thrilled to announce that our May update for Adobe Experience Design CC is ready for you to download.

First of all, thank you for all your feedback, both positive and constructive! We have more than 700 feature requests in UserVoice and we’ve implemented 3 of the top 5 most requested features:

We love connecting with you via Twitter, Facebook, public forums, as well as from customer visits, meetups and conferences all over the world, such as 99U, Front Conf, UX London and Creative Jams.

The entire Adobe XD team is passionate and focused on crafting the end-to-end solution for UI and UX designers, so designers don’t have to rely on different tools being stitched together to tackle the UX challenges of today. We’re still in the beginning of the journey, and we hope you’re excited as we are about what’s ahead.

What’s New in this Update?

Adobe XD Color Picker with Swatches

Building any application from scratch involves building a solid foundation, followed by all the basic tools. And that takes time! Not only implementation time, but a lot of work before that: research, empathy, brainstorming, prototyping, testing and validating, and iteratively. So after iterating on this process, we are happy to present our brand new color picker with swatches. To use it, just select a vector shape, click on the color box and pick a color. You can use HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) values or the sliders to adjust color ranges and transparency (alpha channel), as well as save your favorite swatches by clicking on the plus icon. To remove a swatch, just drag it out of the panel. Gradients will be added soon, but in the meantime, you can copy vectors with gradients from Illustrator and paste into XD.

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Text Improvements: Sub-Range Styling

As part of the improvements to the brand new text engine, you can now select a portion of text and change its font, size and character spacing. Just select the range of your text and use the Property Inspector to change its properties. Changing the color of sub-ranges of text is coming soon.

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Selecting Multiple Artboards and Grids

As part of the work on Artboards, you can now marque select multiple artboards or click on their titles holding the shift key, then activate and edit the Grids using the Property Inspector on the right.

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Aligning Objects or Groups to Artboards

In previous releases of Adobe XD, you could use alignment tools to align objects in relation to each other. Now, if you select one object or a group of objects, you can use the same alignment tools to align it to its artboard. If you select multiple artboards, you can align and distribute them.

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Scrolling

Scrollable Area is the most requested feature on User Voice, and we heard you! As a first step towards enabling the creation of scrollable content within prototypes, you can now scroll long artboards. To use this feature, just create an artboard using a preset template (such as iPhone 6, iPad or Web 1920, either from the start screen or from the list presented when using the artboard tool) and extend its height. You will then see a dashed line representing the fold. If you test your prototype using the Preview window or the Web prototype, you will be able to scroll. Adjusting the fold, fixed elements and horizontal scrolling are in the works via scrollable viewports. Stay tuned!

https://blog.adobe.com/media_bf18cfc0551544553bc83bab03236f79f01b4c98.gif

Full Screen for Web Prototypes

Sometimes you need to present or test your prototypes without distractions. For that, we now have full screen for the Web prototype. To enable it, just click on the full screen icon on the top right. To exit, just press the escape key (Esc).

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Check out this video where I show all these features in action:

What’s Coming Soon?

Embedding Interactive Prototypes

In order to test, validate and learn fast, now you can get a link to share your prototype. Very soon, you’ll also be able to copy HTML code to embed your prototype on any website, like Behance.

Object Blur

Soon, you will be able to set object blur on objects.

Measurements

The ability to check distances is also one of the most requested features in UserVoice. Very soon, you will be able to select elements and see measurements using Option (Alt) as a hot key. We are still fine tuning a couple of edge cases, but here you can see a sneak of it:

https://blog.adobe.com/media_5d7f1ecbc5e1ecadd1d084e6f3e1f636323a9151.gif

Want to Send Us Feedback?

As mentioned before, we are taking a transparent and iterative approach with monthly Adobe XD releases. Being this transparent allows us to work openly with the community in order to get feedback and determine the right set of features designers need. Thank you for being part of this journey with us!

Please submit your feature requests or bugs on our Adobe XD UserVoice page.

For instance, last month, several users reported a problem with bringing in artwork from Illustrator. After looking at this issue, we saw that we were not supporting Ai symbols. And we fixed it!

You can reach out to us on Twitter, and every time you use the hashtag #AdobeXD the entire team can see your tweet. You can also talk to us via Facebook and public forums.

If you share your prototypes created with XD to Behance, please use the hashtag #MadeWithAdobeXD and select Adobe Experience Design under “Tools Used”.

Now, I have a question for you:

We know XD is still in early beta and there is a lot to be done. But what is missing for you to start using it on real projects? It’s ok to be brutally honest!

Feel free to post your answers in the comments section below.

Please download the latest version of Adobe Experience Design and let us know what you think.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.