Adobe XD: What Is It, How It Helps, and How You Can Get Started?

XD from Adobe helps you quickly create, prototype, and test the user experience for your next great idea.  Designers can create wireframes, interactive prototypes, visual designs, and high-fidelity mockups of your ideas on any device or screen with just a few clicks.

In addition, you can easily share your work with team members or friends for real-time feedback and get started quickly because there are no software installs, plugins, or other setups required to get started.

What Is It?

Adobe XD is a vector-based experience design platform that gives teams the tools to craft the world’s best experiences collaboratively.

Designers create prototypes to iterate on ideas and validate them with users quickly. Prototypes are made to test and validate ideas before building them into full applications. The software allows designers to test multiple variations of an idea with real users without spending time building a final product.

XD’s intuitive tools, rich interactions, and seamless publishing make it simple to design for the web or mobile platform. The mobile app wireframing tool is easy to use and works smoothly across major operating systems, iOS and Android. It allows designers to create prototypes for phones and tablets that can be shared as interactive wireframes.

It can also be used for designing web-based applications. The software uses native animations and easily customized transitions using its code generator. XD was announced at the Adobe Max conference in October 2015 and released in February 2016.

How to Get Started?

The XD is divided into two views – the design view and the prototype view. You can access both these menus from the top left of the app. The design view provides designers with features and tools to create layout elements.

The Prototype view designers create connections between pages and define their connection through interaction. For example, after the project is completed, you can use the preview icon to see the final output or share the project with your team via a web-based link. The software also allows designers to save different pages in vector-based format or bitmaps.

Now that you are familiar with the basic interface of the XD, here is how to start a new project:

Create a New Prototype Project

When you open XD, you will be welcomed with a page and an option to start a new project. For example, if you plan to create a project for iPhone, you can select iPhone6 (375*667px) and click on the iPhone icon to start the new project.

Create Background

After creating an artboard, the next step is creating a prototype background. Again, you can choose the colors from the palette and select any prototype background that suits your project requirements.

Set the Header

After setting the background, you can import images and select text and its properties for the prototyping.

Create Content Area and Add Content

Once the content area is ready for the elements, start adding content like images and text to the page.

Designers can create as many pages as they want for the mobile or desktop application and then link these pages through interaction in the Adobe XD app.

Now that you have enough knowledge about XD app from Adobe, you can use it to build and deploy applications.