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Great for rapid prototyping
Updated January 21, 2020

Great for rapid prototyping

Matt Railey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe XD

We use XD in our practice for rapid design prototyping mainly for mobile design. It's great to have native prototyping elements in the app, unlike Sketch for example, but the drawing tools aren't as flexible as Sketch. We use a mix of products depending on what our clients like to use or just to see if there's a tool that might work better - Sketch, Figma, XD, InVision Studio, FramerX - they're all good at different things but they all allow for at least mid-fidelity prototype creation.
  • Natively flexible/responsive drawn elements.
  • Quick and easy to make a lot of progress on a design efficiently.
  • Good app for demoing prototypes.
  • I find the drawing tools a little limiting - Like they really want you to go over to Illustrator for some more complex things instead of staying in XD.
  • There isn't really any support for Design System integration.
  • XD's code export plugins are all either clunky or cost extra, and it's not native to the app itself.
  • On projects where we've used it we were able to get interactive demos in front of stakeholders quickly without using multiple apps.
  • Limited functionality is free to use and it's already available to use as part of the Creative Cloud license, so there's not really any cost for us to use it other than time.
  • The time cost could be negated if the tool became something that we could use for developer collaboration and design system lifecycle management.
We actually use Figma, Sketch, and InVision along with XD in our design practice. We mainly use XD on quick prototypes or experimentation for mobile projects. We always end up falling back to Sketch+InVision for our Design System Implementations and developer collaboration though. XD hasn't been robust enough in those areas for us to feel comfortable using it that way.
We've never reached out to Adobe for support on XD before. But we have for other creative cloud-related issues and their support was fine. I would imagine it would be the same if we needed something specifically XD related. I will say that XD has come a long way since it was first released in beta about 3 or 4 years ago, and they've done a good job listening to the community for feature requests and enhancements.

Do you think Adobe XD delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe XD's feature set?

No

Did Adobe XD live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Adobe XD go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Adobe XD again?

Yes

It's very well suited for creating "throw away work". If you just need to create a prototype to demo to get buy-in or if you're not worried about needing to turn the designs into a full design system or need to worry about developer handoff - then XD works great. There is a time for that type of rapid prototyping in the beginning of large projects, but I haven't found a way to be able to transition the project into a development phase by only relying on XD instead of other tools like Sketch or Figma or InVision.