Adobe XD is a prototyping and UX/UI option for website and mobile application design, featuring a range of UI tools and and templates, a versatile artboard and contextual layer panels, and deep integration with Adobe's creative suite of products for fast import of objects from these applications.
$33.99
per month per license
Piano Activation
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.
If its already part of your organization, and they have a license for Creative Cloud, its worth learning. It doesnt take long to get started, but compared to other software in the same field, its lacking in many ways, from quality of life features to just simply not having the option for Darkmode. Even for website design, UX/UI, and mocking up proof-of-concepts, there are much better tools like Figma.
Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
We utilize many of the applications in the Adobe CC suite and our usage of this application came about simply because it was the one that was already paid for. Bearing that in mind we will definitely be renewing the software upon the expiration of the licensing. I am not sure if this is the solution we would go with were it not already included, we would have to evaluate all other options
Adobe XD is basically on life-support now, there are much better software out there that do everything XD can do, and a few that you don't even have to pay a monthly subscription fee on. While Adobe XD is great as shortcuts that are used in other CC software works, and its integration with CC is great. But it still lacks compared to its closest competitor.
I have not had a need to connect with the Adobe XD support team as of yet, but from past experience when dealing with the other products, the support has been very very good, and I would have no reason to think that this product would be any different. There are a good number of training videos on the Adobe site for this product as well as on other social media sites so a quick search should let you find the answers in several different ways.
Before XD came to the company, screens were designed in Illustrator or Photoshop and a PDF presentation was generated, which was extremely time-consuming. XD saved us a lot of time (and money) by generating interactive prototypes, which are much more tangible for the client than a PDF. The "fight" with Figma is frequent. Both have features in which they are better than their competition. And, while I still choose Adobe XD, don't rule out moving to Figma with its multiple updates.
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
Ease of use means we are up and running in no time.
Integrates and is a part of the Adobe CC platform (which we already subscribe to) so there was no additional cost.
Online proofing and developer handoff links are the icing on the cake. Keeps everything in one place.
Handles all our assets (mostly created in Illustrator) like a dream. Even imports native Photoshop docs, too, so that saves us so much time round tripping.
