Adobe launches Experience Design CC, a new tool for UX designers

Adobe today launched the first public preview of its new Experience Design CC tool, which was previously known as Project Comet.

Experience Design CC is the company’s first tool that is purpose-built for user experience (UX) designers. It takes what Adobe has learned from working with UX designers who currently use its tools like Illustrator, Photoshop and others and distills it into a single product that aims to make designers more productive.

As Andrew Shorten, Adobe’s director of product management for Experience Design CC, told me, the company started this project about 18 months ago. “We began to see challenges with combining established tools like Photoshop,” he said, and noted how the company’s research found lots of gaps in the standard workflow for UX designers. Specifically, the fact that they often had to use multiple tools that didn’t necessarily talk to each other meant that every time designers wanted to change something in their mockups, they had to go back and change it manually (and maybe numerous times to account for different screen sizes).

With this new tool, designers can quickly change back and forth between the artboards designers create in the “design” mode and the prototype mode.

Any changes they make in the design mode (an updated icon, text, etc.) are automatically reflected in the prototype mode, which makes it easy to define interactive hotspots and transitions that make a mockup come to life. Say you want a “read more” button on a mobile homepage to connect to an article; all you have to do is define the hotspot and drag a line to the mockup of the article page.

The design mode features a number of basic drawing and text editing tools, but the main focus is obviously on laying out the different elements of a given page.

To help designers get started, Adobe added UI kits with the standard widgets for designing apps in iOS and Windows, as well as for apps that follow Google’s Material Design guidelines.

A feature that will likely save designers more time than any other in Experience Design CC is probably the “repeat grid tool.” With this, you can define an area on the page (maybe a post on the homepage) and repeat it a couple of times down the page. Typically, this would involve lots of copying and pasting, but with this new tool it only takes a few clicks.

One feature the team hasn’t built into the tool yet, though, is support for responsive designs, but Shorten tells me that’s on the roadmap.

As Shorten stressed, the team also focused on making it very easy to share artboards and prototypes with others. Uploading a prototype to the web takes a single click. The tool then gives you a link you can share with others. And if this is a mobile app, you can also easily use this to try a new design on a phone or tablet, too.

The preview of Adobe Experience Design CC is now available for free to anybody with an Adobe account (even if you are not a paying Creative Cloud user). In a somewhat unusual move, though, the team decided to only make this first preview available for OS X users. Shorten tells me a Windows version is in the works.

For now, the new tool doesn’t integrate other Adobe services like CC libraries and Adobe Stock, but that’s coming soon. Also coming soon, designers will be able to immediately preview their edits on connected mobile devices.

Adobe promises a monthly update cadence, so chances are the company will add these missing features pretty soon. Adobe’s annual MAX conference is scheduled for early November; I’d wager a guess that we’ll see the general availability of Experience Design CC then.

Comments

Five budget-friendly open source storage servers

Storage is essential for the enterprise: Data must be stored. Data must be retrieved. Data must be shared. Data must be secured. At the same time, storage must not consume the entirety of your IT budget. Fortunately, you can find effective solutions in the world of open source. Outside of cost effectiveness, one of the biggest benefits of these solutions is the ability to modify them to perfectly fit your needs. You can make minor changes or even roll your own storage solution based on one of these tools. If you want enterprise support and a "solution in a can" that will meet just about any enterprise storage need, you should turn to Red Hat or SUSE. Both Linux-based companies offer some of the most powerful enterprise-ready tools on the market. But if you'd rather get your hands dirty and craft something of your own—something that won't demolish your budget—these five open source tools are a great place to start. 1: ownCloud ownCloud ( Figure ...

Visa confirms Coinbase wasn’t at fault for overcharging users

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions. While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said. While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that Visa refunded and recharged (under a different merchant category) a month of old transactions. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements. But here’s where it gets weird — this morning Visa issued a statement to some publications shifting the blam...

Use Cortana to define words for you in Windows 10

Microsoft’s Cortana has many uses including sending emails or checking the weather. One of the best uses though is a simple look-up feature for words and their definitions. Combined with the Hey Cortana voice recognition using Cortana to tell you quickly what a word means is a great hands-free tip. There are multiple ways to get Cortana to define a word. If you have Hey Cortana enabled you can simply blurt out your request: “Hey Cortana what is the meaning/definition of inchoate ?” “Hey Cortana define ubiquitously “ You can, of course, also just type in your request e.g “ define beatitude ” although this admittedly takes some of the speed (and fun) out of using the personal digital assistant. For many words, Cortana displays the definition within a card, and OxfordDictionaries or EncartaDictionaries powers it. Sometimes, if Cortana misunderstands you or does not have the definition, the assistant opens up a web page after performing a web search for...

Detail

hi this is ajijulla sahib from sri ganesh college of engineering and technology

Airbnb will open its Cuba listings to users outside the United States

Airbnb will now let travelers from outside the U.S. to book properties in Cuba after receiving authorization from the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press . Previously, only Americans were allowed to reserve the site’s Cuban listings . They will open to international users on April 2. Airbnb launched its Cuban operations in April 2014 , four months after the Obama administration revealed that it will begin to restore diplomatic relations with the Communist country . The historic policy change means that travel and trade sanctions will be lifted , which is expected to boost tourism to Cuba dramatically because Americans no longer need licenses to visit. In fact, President Obama is currently on an official visit to Cuba , the first president since Calvin Coolidge to do so. According to the AP, Cuba is currently Airbnb’s fastest-growing market, with about 4,000 homes added since it opened listings. Other travel businesses...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog