I am sad today...when are you guys going to add auto layout...you let Figma get there before you :-(

[terrylawyer]

I haven't tried they're version of it, but don't need to. I'm upset at the thought of it. For my work, XD would  probably easily be much better than other UI design apps. A lot of the big features are great, and a lot little things are missing, but I get the feeling you work on those. But one big thing is missing that would put you way ahead of other programs...auto layout. You can do this Adobe XD Team...let digital designers design like the tech we create. I'm tired of nudging and moving boxes around for every little layout change: give us autolayout please!!!

So my question is when we will see some auto layout in XD?

The web has it (for years), X Code (a dev tool for christ's sake) has it, Unity (a game engine for christ's sake) has it, Sketch has it (not that great though), Framer has it (while crappy for actual design), and now Figma. When will XD get it?

[Sjaani]

It does seem like a logical thing to be able to do. I would suggest jumping onto this feature request thread or looking for a similar post which already has more votes and upvoting it so that it gets more attention.

[terrylawyer]

I've already done that...probably multiple times for that paticular feature request.

And I believe it was briefly mentioned in an October XD Updates blog post...something about "smart layout".

And someone made a plugin that was a nice try, but not very useful for substantial design work.

So I have a question: can someone from the Adobe team give a very rough estimate or some idea of when this will adressed in a release that we can try?

No disrepect to other feature requests out there, but deciding where an object is placed on a screen is one of the most frequent actions and decisions designers make...where a lot of tedious drudgery occurs when designing. Make that easy for us, and we'll probably reward you handsomely. If you need another hint, web devs absolutely love flexbox and use it regularly, maybe too much. Make a feature like that. I thought repeat grid might be that kind of feature, but it's use cases are really limited in number (I hardly ever use it because it's not flexible enough to meet real design needs).

[elainecc · Accepted solution]

Hey there! We actually shared a little bit about this in our roadmap post. While I can't comment on the actual time frame, I can say that it's something we're actively working on. Hope that helps!

Elaine Chao

Product Manager, Adobe XD

[terrylawyer]

Well it does help when a product manager swoops in and replies with some info 🙂 I appreciate that. And I remember seeing that specifc line in the blog post...which got me excited and elevated my expectations a good bit haha. I obviously can't speak for every designer, but that feature(s)--autolayout--would definitely put XD over the top as my go-to for UI design.

Some reasons why: that protyping flow is ace (substantial animation tools without getting you buried in micro interactions/animations), it plays nice with other applications (can import and export, doesn't mangle SVG too badly, etc.), I love being able to easily link to other XD files, and the style mangement tools are nice and simple (maybe could add more, but I do kinda like the style stuff to not have a crazy amount of options -- easier to manage). And the vector drawing tools are pretty good too, but I still handle complex stuff in Illustrator (hence I love the creative cloud libraries collections).

So yea, I'm a fan haha. There are some good tools out there that are probably good options for people who are wholly focused on UI design, but XD and the creative suite is way better for someone like me who works with UI, video, sound, images, etc. And I do have a lot of trust in Adobe's experience. The new apps for UI design tend to focus on features that attract newbie designers to their systems, but aren't great for people who need more sophistication and range from their tools. I feel like Adobe manages that better b/c you guys have a lot of experience to draw from in that giant company. And people who've taken a lot gruff from angry users haha...and some failed products to learn from.

Oh, and the other novel features -- XD's voice prototyping and Adobe's new AI and 3D work...👍 really nice.

Ok, that's enough of my therapy session haha. But here's a little more data for ya if it helps--my XD usage in summary:

--I used the beta test version years ago and thought it was going to eventually become the app for me...because of that realy nice and easy prototype to sharing flow. But I couldn't use it for client projects yet because it was missing some necessary design tools (like a list of layers haha)

--So for the last few years, I'd use XD ocassionally for client work when I wanted to make some simple prototypes from flat images of screen designs: drop PNGs on artboards, link them up, share and get comments.

--Then you added auto-animate...started using it for some parts of client projects after that (was an effecient design-to-protype flow).

--Used Sketch a lot this summer (I usually hate Sketch, but there was an auto-layout plugin that made it so much easier to do iterations on projects with loads of screens). But I was exporting PNGs and plugging them into XD...which made me wish I could just do everything in XD.

--Then you released components with states (❤️ ❤️ ❤️). So now I'm back in XD again from design to protoype.