July 2019 Release of Adobe XD: Improved Designer-Developer Collaboration, Mobile Commenting, and More

Design is a team sport; creating useful and delightful digital products requires much more than just individual designers working diligently on their creations. Modern design means working with other designers, developers, stakeholders, and contributors throughout your organization, not to mention your clients, customers, and users. With this month’s release of Adobe XD, we’re introducing new ways to collaborate in XD with these different teams to accelerate review cycles, help you communicate intent, and share your vision with everyone.

To take advantage of all the updates, be sure to download the latest version of XD, and read on for more details on everything included in the July 2019 release.

Improved designer-developer collaboration with unified links

One of the most critical yet frustrating parts of the design process is working with developers to bring your creative vision to life. Oftentimes, it’s hard for development teams to accurately translate a designer’s intent into a real-life product. Meanwhile, designers often wonder why the finished product differs from their designs.

In previous versions of XD, designers could generate links to interactive prototypes. This allowed you to showcase how a digital experience would look and feel, as well as generate links for design specs for developers, which included all the assets, colors, character types, interactions and other details about the experience. Together, these two artifacts helped developers build out a designer’s vision, but these separate experiences meant developers had to jump back and forth between them to truly understand a designer’s plan. This was especially painful for more complex interactions that designers can create with XD’s advanced prototyping capabilities.

Now, you can generate a single shareable link that includes both an interactive prototype and the design specs your developers need. This will help them better understand your intent and create a more intuitive workflow on their end. Simply click “Share for Development” and send away!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iLfZICf8deo

With these unified links, developers can easily navigate your prototypes, add comments and provide feedback, download assets, and see all the details of your designs and proposed interactions in one place, saving them valuable time and keeping everyone on the same page. We’ve also improved specifications for a subset of text within larger text containers, based on feedback from our users: XD will now let developers select and inspect different text spans in a single text layer that includes multiple styles, including superscript and subscript styles.

Quickly navigate prototypes with grid view

XD offers powerful design and prototyping capabilities to help you visualize and communicate your design vision with anyone. Using “Share for Review” or “Share for Development,” you can generate links to interactive prototypes for your experiences and share them with product managers, developers, executives, and others who might want to provide feedback.

For more complicated products, designers often create dozens of artboards, which means that these prototypes can be difficult for non-designers (or anyone, for that matter) to navigate. In previous versions of XD, anyone viewing prototypes needed to click through each individual screen of the prototype until they found the one they were looking for.

With this latest version of XD, reviewers can see all the screens in a prototype in a new grid view, which displays a thumbnail representation of each screen in a design project. With grid view, reviewers can more efficiently explore your XD prototypes and jump to the screens most relevant to them.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/D7UBc5sSufI

Provide feedback from anywhere with comments from mobile

Design teams are constantly iterating and often require a quick turnaround for reviews to keep projects on track. Oftentimes, reviewers access prototypes from a mobile device and want to add comments and view others’ input while on the go.

With this latest release of XD, you can now view and comment on prototypes right from your mobile device. Mobile commenting helps you accelerate review cycles and makes it easier for your teammates and stakeholders to provide feedback whenever, from wherever they are.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ztC5TusqXO0

UX Community

We’d love to continue the dialogue! Help us shape the future of Adobe XD by submitting feature requests or file bugs at https://adobexd.uservoice.com. You can follow our handle @AdobeXD for updates or reach the team on Twitter using the #AdobeXD. You can also talk to us using Facebook, where we share videos and updates as well as answer questions during live sessions.

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