Overview - Adobe XD Tutorial

- [Instructor] When asked to refresh a course, I always ask a question before starting, what's missing? For this course, the answer was glaringly obvious. If you search the internet for how to use XD, you'll be presented with a lot of what I call whizzy stuff, super cool animations, futuristic-looking components, and so on, all focusing on XD as a UX design tool. I have to admit, I'm guilty of this, which is why I have deliberately placed this chapter in front of the next one where I get into the whizzy stuff. This chapter answers my what is missing question. The answer, where does XD fit into the overall UX process? There is a lot that goes on before XD flames up a single pixel. In very simple terms, the UX mission asks a rather direct question, how can we make life easier for the user? You may be wondering why I've chosen a parking app for this course. It's because when I'm confronted with this parking kiosk, I watched everyone from the elderly to 20 somethings try to figure out how to pay for parking. For me, the largest UX problem was trying to figure out why someone would put the credit card PIN pad at knee level. Whenever I am asked to define UX, I turn the question around and ask, what do you want it to mean? The term has become a jumble of contradictory definitions to the point where UX is being confused with the job practices of everyone ranging from graphic artists to front-end developers, so let's clear that up right now. User experience is both a process and a mission, and they are distinctly different. The process is the workflow from initial research to conceptualization to upload and usage in the wild, and require several specialized skills, which may include UX researchers, designers, writers, motion designers, interactivity designers, right up to developers. The process involves a lot of software tools, such as many of the tools presented so far. It also involves brainstorming and planning, with all of it moving in a straight line to an iterative product. The UX mission goes above all of that. It focuses on the person who will load the product onto their device or open it on a webpage. It focuses on making life easier for that person in such a way that they will continue using the product. In short, the mission is, as I love to point out, to fall in love with the user, not the technology. There are roughly five phases to the UX process. The first is discovery and problem definition, or as it is here, discovery and hypothesis. The process starts with the discovery of how things work now and the negative and positive impact of the current system on the users and the business. Insight can be collected from analytics, feedback, and previous research. In many cases, more research is usually required to understand the specific areas that are candidates for change. In many cases, the data not only confirms the area chosen by the business requirements, but also highlights other issues and needs that were not so obvious. These insights, deeper problems, and a clearer picture of who the users are and what they need are invaluable. This phase is also called the problem definition phase, and normally, these are the artifacts and deliverables used and produced that could include a full presentation of the research results, use case scenarios, and personas, all of which can be done in XD. Ideally, the minimum viable product definition usually locked and decided before it reaches the design phase should be fluid and ongoing so that the insights from research and data found in the discovery phase define the final MVP, or at least, are earmarked for the very next iterations. A series of prioritization sessions should follow up after discovery to align business development and design. Already a kickoff, development and design should be talking to each other, understanding each other's constraints and priorities, and negotiating those in favor of users and the business against risks, dependencies, and feasibility. Normally, the artifacts and deliverables used and produced during this phase could include wireframes, lo-fi prototypes, user journeys, and touchpoints. Again, XD can be used for this purpose. When the UX design phase start, it usually happens that developers and designers disappear into their caves and weeks later emerge again for the wireframe of visuals handover. By then, it is too late. Designers and developers should be working together to evaluate the ideas and hypotheses both groups have presented, agreeing the designs are technically feasible because technical feasibility allows for an effective design for the user. Moving through this phase, the opportunities and the need for collaboration and weekly communication between designers, developers, and business, just to increase in the UX design phase with the review of wireframe journeys, the evolution of a prototype to test the team's hypotheses, and the preparation for the user testing that would review whether the designs solve the user issues found during the discovery phase. Normally, these are the artifacts and deliverables used and produced by XD during this phase. When it comes to UX design, a lot of things are going on. While you are busy working away, the developer team will be busily preparing the whole infrastructure that will hold the new system. By embracing the UX mission, the development team, after testing the prototype, will have not only a confirmation of what they're going to develop, but also a realization of how much time the team saved by not launching into coding immediately after the scope was defined. Do that and they risk coding for a solution that would not have been addressed. This is also the phase where the developers can guide the UX designers to produce designs that are scalable and utilize previously created designs, which are now part of your design system pattern library. This can all be easily accomplished with the variety of sharing methods in XD. Once the development team has received all of the front-end design deliverables, they might eventually discover dependencies and blockers that were not apparent when both teams first reviewed the wireframes and designs. In the past, developers too often decided to adapt the designs themselves, fearing that once the UX and UI crew had thrown their deliverables over the fence to the development team and disappeared, well, the window to get designers to rethink their designs was closed. As a result, developers invested time and effort to do things themselves just to have them corrected again by the design team in the next sprint, having their initiative misinterpreted as an act of excluding the design team. The point is that every time developers and designers miss an opportunity to collaborate and communicate as one team with a common goal to deliver a solution for users in business, both sides have to redo their work and waste time over things that could easily have been agreed upon and quickly fixed. Whenever I am asked to define UX, I turn the question around and ask, what do you want it to mean? The term has become a jumble of contradictory definitions to the point where UX is being confused with the job practices of everyone ranging you from graphic artists to developers and even front-end developers. So let's clear that up right now. User experience is both a process and a mission, and they are distinctly different. The process is the workflow from initial research to conceptualization to upload and usage in the wild, and requires several specialized skills, which may include UX researchers, designers, writers, motion designers, interactivity designers to front-end and back-end developers. The process involves a lot of software tools, such as many of the tools presented so far in this course. Brainstorming and planning, with all of it moving in a straight line to the final product. The UX mission goes above all of that. It focuses on the person who will load the product onto their device or open it on a webpage. It focuses on making life easier for that person in such a way that they will continue using the product. In short, the mission is, as I said right at the top of this chapter, to fall in love with the user. So let's take a look at some of the areas where XD can be used in various places during the UX process.