In a design-centric world where standards change almost daily, a focus on elevating and modernizing UI practices is critical for any company that wants to be considered an industry leader. By putting a heavy focus on design, companies can greatly impact the user experience which in turn impacts user adoption. Adobe XD is just one screen design tool in a saturated industry, but it is the tool that Stonewall counts on to deliver the best user experience to our clients. XD is a cost effective, collaborative and powerful platform that allows for more efficient web development work. We’ve outlined below just some of the reasons XD stands apart as the tool to use to elevate your UI design.
What is Adobe XD?
Adobe XD is a design platform and tool that enables the creation of web and application designs. XD was built with the goal of providing companies the ability to create rich user experiences for their products. The product focuses on supporting the UI/UX design process from start to finish. Organizations are able to use XD to design in a collaborative and communicative environment, which elevates their product design and delivery. XD serves as a creative cloud solution that is constantly benefiting from frequent updates and new features based on community feedback. At Stonewall, we’ve made the switch to rely solely on XD for all of our UI design processes.
How Adobe XD stands apart in a world of UI design solutions
Adobe XD is a leading tool in the industry for UI design. There are many features that make XD stand out (see features below) but at the highest level, the core principles of XD illustrate its uniqueness in the space.
Design
Adobe XD’s focus on supporting modern designs in a rapidly changing, technology centric world have taken standard wireframe designs to a new level. With XD, designers can start with wireframe designs to outline needed functionality before elevating the entire design to a modern and responsive user experience. XD allows designers to provide a client with the full experience of how their website or application will look and feel, ensuring satisfaction with the end product.
Create
Adobe XD allows system designers to truly create an experience for their users. Features that replicate how website or application functionality will work provides a system design that is just short of the functioning product. Completed XD designs will respond to user actions such as clicking a button on a page, giving the user a true sense of a created product.
Collaborate and Share
The XD platform centers on the ability for designers to collaborate and share designs. Coediting functionality allows the ability for a team to work on one design, promoting collaboration and iterative creation processes. Additionally, XD’s focus on design sharing allows users the ability to share their designs in different formats. The XD sharing ability lets designers tailor the shared design to the individuals or group they are sharing with. From developers to end users, XD sharing has a different experience available for everyone.
Features
Adobe XD is a comprehensive UI design platform and it may seem easy to get lost in all of the features it has to offer. We’ve outlined the key features we use everyday in our UI design work to break it down:
- Components: Design elements, think buttons and icons, that can saved and used easily across multiple screens within your designs. We love the components features for many reasons, but one clear example that stands out is system menus. At Stonewall, we use the components feature to easily create system navigation menus and populate these saved menus across every screen in our designs.
- Content-Aware Layout: Create and edit objects with layouts in mind. This allows automatic adjustments to objects as you update and change the design.
- Responsive Resize: Adapt screens for various devices with ease with responsive resize. Relative placement and scale will be retained without extra manual design labor required.
- Adobe Fonts: Utilize fonts from an extensive Adobe library, ensuring texts in your design fit exactly the look you are aiming for.
- Asset Export: Share assets, think images and icons, easily with developers for use in the design and build of the website or application.
- Interations and Triggers: Connect screens together so the flow of the design maps to the exact user experience. Triggers will allow users to utilize an action within a screen design and see the true response that the system will produce.
- Preview: Review how your design will look in real time and easily change back to design mode to make changes.
- Coediting: Collaborate on the same document in real time with other designers on your team.
- Share: Share your design in various formats, tailoring the review experience for the individuals or groups you are sharing the design with.
- Cloud Storage: Create and store your designs in the cloud, saving the headaches that accompany local document storage.
- Integrations: Integrate XD with your favorite applications to promote productivity.
In a world where design has become as important as functionality, Adobe XD allows companies the ability to create rich user experiences for websites and applications. At Stonewall we have been able to closely collaborate and design using Adobe XD as our UI/UX tool. In our solutions-based work, Adobe XD’s advantages include its responsive design, prototyping ability, and efficient screen sharing. We consider Adobe XD a key asset in elevating our design and delivering the best product to our clients.