M+E Connections

By Chris Tribbey

Adobe has given its Adobe Experience Design CC tool an early release in the hopes of garnering feedback from long-time Adobe user experience (UX) designers, the company announced March 14.

First shown off last October, Adobe Experience Design (XD) CC is geared toward mobile app and Web sites developers, and aims to make the process of designing for mobile devices simple and error-free. The tool is available as a free download for anyone with an Adobe ID, and Adobe expects to release the tool commercially for Adobe Creative Cloud members later this year.

“In our fast-moving, connected culture, poorly designed app or web experiences suffer a painful and short shelf-life,” said Paul Gubbay, VP of creative cloud product management at Adobe. “Designers have been waiting for the right UX tool to simplify app and web experience design. From the beginning Adobe XD has been a constructive collaboration between our team and the design community and we look forward to the feedback from designers worldwide.”

Adobe XD integrates design and prototyping in a desktop app, helping designers move from wire framing and design to prototyping and preview, Adobe shared. The preview available today includes intuitive design and layout tools, a dedicated prototype mode, desktop preview mode for testing prototypes, and built-in sharing for stakeholders to access prototypes in browsers and mobile devices.

“XD positions itself very well,” said Marc Hemeon, CEO and founder of creative agency Design Inc. “I can sketch a few ideas out, get a prototype, get it on my phone, and just very rapidly change it in real time. Super simple, super fast, super easy to use.”

Adobe XD is available for Mac OS with Adobe planning mobile companion apps for iOS and Android. Windows 10 support will be available down the line, as will be integration with Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC.

“Prototyping and usability testing are key skills we are instilling into our students, as they take their first steps in user and experience design” said Tom Green, professor of interactive multimedia at the School of Media Studies at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto. “Adobe XD is not only a great tool for giving students the opportunity to create interactive prototypes from their designs but to also iterate those prototypes as they move through the User Testing process.”