With ongoing developments in the rapidly expanding experience design space, there are increasing expectations for the apps and digital tools we use every day – and the bar for good UX only continues to increase, putting more pressure on designers and developers to deliver stellar experiences. Today, Adobe XD released new features that help deliver on these expectations, by introducing the ability to create and maintain design systems. This new design systems support will enable UX designers to easily share brand assets and re-usable design elements in order to achieve consistency and efficiency across their organizations.
Whether at an agency, a startup or a large company, implementing a design system offers a solution when there’s a need to design at scale and ensure consistency across the end-user experience, making it easier to create efficient and seamless user experiences. Adobe will also soon be launching a new website focused on exploring design systems; we’ll check in with you later this month to share updates and content.
In addition, designers can now use keyboards and gamepad interactions when designing and prototyping experiences in XD. With this release users can assign keyboard triggers to simulate desktop-based experiences, as well as use connected XBox One and Playstation Dualshock controllers as inputs to simulate interaction for game console experiences. These new prototyping capabilities can help game designers develop and prototype specific parts of a game, such as a Settings menu or character selection, as well as design keyboard shortcuts for desktop apps and web apps to enable users to be more efficient.
Additional New Features in Adobe XD
- New plugins to extend the power of XD – Momentum around XD’s plugin ecosystem continues to grow each month, with over 150 plugins now available. With an increasing number of plugins and a recently launched accelerator to inspire new offerings, XD has also updated the plugin manager, enabling users to see summaries and detailed descriptions, as well as search for plugins based on keywords.
- Sharing prototypes and design specs – Users can now review each incoming request to review a design specs link and decide whether to grant access.
- Artboard Guides – Guides can now be added to any artboard by dragging them out from the top or left side of the artboard, making it easy to align elements and have consistent positioning of elements across artboards.
- New polygon tool makes it faster to create a multitude of shapes, including triangles, rhombus, pentagons and other polygons with up to 100 sides. When combined with auto-animate, the polygon tool makes it easy to morph between different shapes.
Henry Lares is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post. In regards to academics, Henry earned an engineering degree from Apex Technical School. Henry has a passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
