Why is XD so underdeveloped?

Question

I've been using this program for the last 6 months, 8.5 hours per day M-F, to redesign our entire website.

The foundational features are fairly intuitive (basic functions of components, creating shapes/groups/layouts) but beyond that, XD has been a serious pain in the ass. The only reason we're using it is to remain within the Adobe Creative Cloud, though it's clear to us at this point going with any other competitor would have been more efficient.

The patches seem to consistently introduce more problems than they solve. Performance has been all over the place between versions, sometimes the program would constantly crash, at one point a couple months ago all Cloud documents were completely inaccessible, which ended in an extremely tense "Well, go home I guess" from my boss.

This is a professional product that people ARE CURRENTLY USING for PROFESSIONAL WORK, and Adobe consistently washes their hands of any responsibility for poor performance and being MILES behind the competition. My experience with XD to date could be described as "Beta" at BEST, and I actively recommend people away from the app.

We need more intuitive component inheritance. Manually wiring all component states in a dot-navigation image carousel takes an absolutely ludicrous amount of time for the most basic output. We should be able to push specific changes to existing component instances without overwriting all existing overrides.

Something as simple as implementing a scroll bar is incredibly complicated and requires research and workarounds. That goes for pretty much every solution in XD beyond the most basic layouts. It's all workarounds and research and trying to goof the program into doing what you need.

And the most frustrating part of this is that the XD team is just so slow with features. Waiting for this app to bloom has been agonizing. It honestly feels like you have a development team of less than five people at this rate of progress. I just don't understand how this is all so underbaked and lazy.

I look through these forums pretty often when I'm trying to find if a feature even exists or not, and I see a lot of features your team is "working on," but then I see v 31.0 come out, and the big feature is... Cloud Document Organization. Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING me?

I've already made my bed with this project. We can't leave XD at this point, and thank god I'm about ready to hand this off to our dev team. I absolutely will not use this for another professional project until Adobe steps up their game and treats this like a real Application.

Again, I have now spent well over 1000 hours in this program. I am not speaking out of turn.

XD is not nearly finished. The XD team has not demonstrated an understanding of their users. XD is NOT deserving of the Adobe name.

elainecc · Answer

Thanks for your feedback, and I appreciate your frustration at what you feel is insufficient progress on XD's part. If you have anything concrete that you'd like us to look at, we're more than happy to hear specific ideas that you're interested in - and, as you probably know, we have our feature request database at https://adobexd.uservoice.com that you can add individual ideas to.

As for your frustration about the pace of the features that come from XD, I will point out that XD releases 6 times as often as Photoshop and Illustrator, which means that each release has a smaller slice. The release you just dismissed? Happened just a few weeks after we released Stacks, Scroll Groups, and design tokens, each of which unlocked a series of workflows that our users have been asking for.

Every feature requires integration with the complex ecosystem we've built around XD - everything from coediting to sharing to plugins to even our basics have to work with each other. Our features are researched, designed, developed, and tested, and some of the features you see have lead times on the order of years, not weeks. But more importantly, we are deeply committed to making each release incrementally better and are iterating quickly.

So, while I hear your frustration that your particular needs are not being met, I also have to say that we're very proud of the partnership we have with our customers and of the team that builds this product.

Elaine Chao

Sr. Product Manager

Adobe XD

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