January 2019 Release of Adobe XD: Auto-Animate Comes to the Browser and More

2019 is here, and it’s going to be an exciting one for Adobe XD. We have lots of new features and improvements on the way, but to kick off the new year we are focusing on making some small but mighty tweaks to existing features released in 2018. Auto-Animate, one of our most impactful new features from 2018, is now supported in the browser. We’ve also added new ways to collaborate and new functionality for voice prototyping that adds support for commands and speech playback for all of XD’s languages, in multiple accents and dialects.

Read on to see everything new we’ve released this month, and to see how far we’ve come in building this powerhouse app, check out XD product manager Elaine Chao’s lookback at Adobe XD in 2018.

New to XD: Auto-Animate in the browser

Animation is a powerful tool in UX design, helping with flow and delighting users at the same time. With Auto-Animate in Adobe XD, you’re able to create prototypes with immersive animated transitions, fully functional and interactive on devices, in the preview window, and now, in your web browser too.

When we launched Auto-Animate in October, users quickly adopted the feature and began prototyping with micro-interactions. While you could view those micro-interactions on mobile devices and in XD itself, you couldn’t view them in a web browser. Now, you’re able to view animations in prototypes and get the animation property values in design specs on a web browser, which should make it easier to showcase your designs to stakeholders and other partners.

To take advantage of this new support for browsers with older prototypes or design specs, just re-publish them using the latest version of Adobe XD. To learn about using this feature to its fullest, check out our best practices guide to using Auto-Animate.

Adobe XD is a powerful tool for collaboration. The ability to comment on specific aspects of prototypes means partners and stakeholders can seamlessly provide feedback that is easy to take action on. Now, you can turn on the All Screen Comments feature in XD, which allows you to see all comments made on a prototype in a single list. Clicking on an individual comment takes you right to the artboard in question, allowing you to reply to, resolve, or delete the piece of feedback before jumping onto the next one.

Scrolling down the list of comments, you’ll see that comments are grouped together by artboard, with a blue highlight indicating the artboard you’re currently on. This should keep it easy to focus in on the comments you need when making tweaks to each artboard, but if you’d like to go back to viewing comments on a per-artboard basis, you can simply turn the All Screen Comments feature off. You’re also able to filter comments based on criteria like reviewer, date, and more.

This feature will update automatically in the latest version of Adobe XD; no need to re-publish your prototypes to take advantage of this new functionality.

New to XD: All voice languages and accent support

Voice interfaces are increasingly commonplace, and that’s why we continue to expand and improve our voice prototyping features in Adobe XD. While you’ve been able to prototype voice experiences in XD since October, we’re proud to say you’re now able to do that in any of the program’s languages. That means whether you’re designing for users that speak English, French, German, Korean, or Japanese, you’re able to prototype voice experiences in their native language, with support for more languages in the future.

The latest release of XD also supports regional accents for voice commands, so for example, whether you’re in the U.S. or the UK, Canada or Australia, you will be able to successfully prototype an effective, localized voice experience.

When creating a prototype with speech playback, your version of Adobe XD will automatically select your operating system’s default language and region. From there you’ll be able to select different voices based on your region, male or female along with other options.

Since XD introduced third-party plugins last fall, the ecosystem continues to grow. As part of our continual improvement and growth, this month’s release adds new features for plugins, including the ability for users to disable plugins without uninstalling them, and developer access to colors and text styles in the Assets panel.

In case you missed it, December’s release of XD 14 had even more plugin developer tools, including easier access to selections, and, by popular request, document and node metadata. You can read all the details on the Adobe Tech Blog. Be sure to follow the blog to read about XD 15 and beyond. But that’s not all! We’re excited to announce XD-awesome, a gitHub repo for developers to share open source plugins, handy developer resources, and more. If you’re excited about XD plugins, and have feedback, suggestions, plugin requests, or you’re considering building your first XD plugin, be sure to join our forums and chat with developers as well as members of the XD team.

UX Community

We’d love to continue the dialogue! Help us shape the future of Adobe XD by submitting feature requests or file bugs at https://adobexd.uservoice.com. You can follow our handle @AdobeXD for updates or reach the team on Twitter using the #AdobeXD. You can also talk to us using Facebook, where we share videos and updates as well as answer questions during live sessions.

#MadeWithAdobeXD

While sharing your prototypes on Behance, don’t forget to tag them with #MadeWithAdobeXD and select Adobe XD under “Tools Used” for the opportunity to be featured in the Adobe XD Newsletter.