Dear XD, Please Consider These 6 Wishes

Wish 1: Rethink onboarding and initialization

Currently there are two ways to get started with an XD file. No file open? You’re shown a wonderful onboarding modal. Have another file open already? You start with a white screen. Investigating deeper this screen is actually the chalkboard (but white instead of gray) and it’s just a shortcut for the last option inside the modal: “Custom size of infinity by infinity”.

Ceci n’est pas un XD.

First, regardless of whether I have a file open already or not, XD should default to showing the helpful onboarding window. Second, the default state of the “Custom size” should be a consistent gray chalkboard. A white chalkboard is inconsistent with my mental model of how artboards and the chalkboard play together. If I were to start with an artboard of infinite area, I shouldn’t be able to drop and nest artboards into it.

Wish 2: Northwesterner origin

I suggest an off-center origin: up and to the left. Or better yet, give an option to choose origin position. Starting at the center of the chalkboard ignores how people tend to build and add objects within the file: rightward and downward. My flows grow to the right when indicating sequences: temporal progress through a flow. Growing downward indicates side stepping: exploring select menus or error states. Combined with XD’s default placement of new artboards to the right or below existing ones, the chalkboard’s real estate in the southeast quadrant gets overcrowded while the other three remain barren.

Sure, an off-center origin is asymmetric. But this change would omit that moment where every designer realizes they have to select everything and manually drag all assets northwest, just to make for more working space.

Wish 3: Focus the design

Over time I caught myself diving deeper into tweaking the rounded corners of a button or dialing in on a line’s perfect transparency. I often fell into the UI trenches rather than staying afloat in UX. Ignoring the fact that I could practice rigorous habits… I wonder if it may be helpful to have an even more spartan, bare-bones mode that restricts me to the following:

Shapes: rectangle, ellipse, or line

Shape styles: fill or outline

Colors: 1 gray, 1 white, 1 highlight color

Text styles: 2 sizes

If the user chooses to graduate up to medium-fidelity mode, a switch could lock the low-fidelity version and send it to the back with transparency — using it like a tracing guide.

Wish 4: Focus the prototype

The design mode seems to step on the toes of the prototype mode a little bit. When prototyping, the ability to edit size, text, and position of objects seem like design mode’s territory. Why not remove them? In their stead, bring in some features to create interactions easier or to better understand the flow and relationships. Visually emphasize the home artboard and those that are unlinked and idle. Why not use the interactions, directionality in transitions, and artboard diffs to auto-magically guide, organize, and place artboards?

Also I noticed that when choosing transitions, I only needed these four:

“Appear immediately” — for dropdowns

“Appear slowly” — for loading

“Slide left, slowly” — for drilling in

“Slide right, slowly” — for going back

Wish 5: Better communication

When a video is shared, viewers need to watch the entire silent video and try to recall moments in the video to reference features. However, being guided by a voice narration or designer’s notes would help better communicate what is happening. Better yet, a table of contents referring to flagged points in time or flow upon which to jump, could help convey the UX message as a whole or specific moments in context. Maybe artboard names could be used for this purpose, because I noticed that after months of using XD, I ceased to care about my artboards’ naming hygiene.

Wish 6: Usage statistics

Who has accessed the prototype? How many unique views did it get? Where on screens did people click the most — even the regions that are non-interactive? Where did we lose people? How quickly are people going through the prototype? Usability questions come natural to the curious designer who peeks out from behind the curtain. Help us answer them. Enabling comments (see Invision) is an obvious and widely popular request; but they’re difficult to manage and understand their true priorities, especially in a sea of opinions. Instead, analyzing usage statistics could be objective, clear, and truer to how the design is actually used.