What is Adobe XD | Alex Poterek

Welcome. Thanks for having me, everyone. Happy to be here. I'm excited. I've only been to San Mateo once, so it's kind of cool to come back here. Yeah. So this is kind of my intro to this. Have you ever seen a presentation that just starts their slide off with, like, hello, and that's it, and they just kind of ramble about that? Like, I don't like that. I was trying to figure out something else to do, and then I got really caught up in this slide. This is kind of this weird tangent that I'm going to go on. Just like, what's up is kind of a weird thing to say because there's a lot of apostrophes and question marks. So I want to simplify that. It's like, oh, what's up? And then it's like, why is this such a question? Because I'm not actually asking any of you what's up because I don't really want a response at this point. So a super underrated term is sup. Sup. So I'm just going to go with that. It's sweet, to the point, and it's a question that doesn't really demand an answer, and I really like that. Like I was told, or like you were all told, I am Alex Potarek. I'm a senior experience designer at Adobe. I've been there for a few years now. I think you all know Adobe. We brought you Flash Player and Acrobat updates, and that's kind of like our claim to fame. Just a quick kind of tally. How many of you guys do design work? Okay, so we have a handful. Are you guys using Adobe software or other software? Generally Adobe. Cool. So this presentation's kind of gonna give you a perspective from the design side of the business, and we're gonna show you prototyping. I guess the next slide's actually better for this. I'm gonna give you a little introduction to who I am and what I do. Then I'm gonna give you a demo of XD, just so you guys can have context to what I'm gonna be talking about in the future. And then I'm gonna talk about where Adobe XD is and how it became a product, because it was nothing just a few years ago, and then we've risen it in the company to be its own product. And then I'm gonna let you guys ask me some questions, and then we'll take it from there. So a little bit about me. I'm from Detroit originally. That's where O2 Creative Solutions was, which was mentioned, my last job. We did a lot of interesting work. We did a lot of live events, but alongside of live events, we did a lot of UI design. We did motion graphics. We did a lot of reveals. These are incredibly hard things to prototype for. These are things that you really have to build a consensus around when you're showing this to the clients, because you can see some of these ideas, just speaking to them, you're not going to get the point across, and the client's not always going to sign off on that. And that's a huge part of the prototyping process. So just a quick little thing, motion prototypes are a huge part of it. You can see I have this kind of faux 3D rendering where we had these giant screen displays where all of these things are kind of working together. So sometimes it included building actual working programmed prototypes. Sometimes it was just projection mapping just in our office. But like everything in Detroit, Everything was really car-related. I'm not the biggest car fan, admittedly, but everything we did revolved around it. So it was like Toyota, Chrysler, GM, those kind of things. We occasionally got really cool products like Project Runway. We went on set with them and trained the clients or the contestants in our software and worked with them, which is really cool. But I was really thrilled when Adobe reached out to me. specifically the Adobe Design department. They've seen some of the work I've done, the prototyping I did, and all the— I do a lot of programming alongside with all of my design work, so that was appealing to them. They reached out to me and I did the interview with them, and they got me on board. Excuse me. So, just to give a little context to what Adobe Design is, it's actually this It's an independent organization within Adobe. So we have products like XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, all of those things. Those are all product teams. We're not actually on those product teams. We actually are kind of resourced for them. So they reach out to us, and then we form a team, and then we say, OK, this team's going to be dedicated to you for a little bit, and then give you support on features and designs. And when I say design, I'm not just saying the pixels of it all. We actually design the entire experience out. We say, this is how the user wants to interact with this, And then we kind of go through this entire process, and then we work with the product managers and engineers on that. A really appealing part of joining the team was I got to be on Adobe Design Studio. It's now called Design Lab, but Studio team's really unique in Adobe. It's sort of this startup within the Adobe Design organization. And what that means is that we actually look at gaps in our products and we try to fill them. So we say we're missing something in motion, in the motion world, and we say, how can we approach that? We also look at future technologies and what's coming up and how we can actually introduce that into our product lineup. So what was really interesting about that was we were able to create our own ideas. So I would go to my team and my managers and I would pitch an idea to them. And I would say, hey, I think we're missing this, and I think we should do this about it. And they would say, hey, that's a dumb idea, or they'd say, that's a great idea, and let's go forward with that. And if they gave us the green light, they'd say, you have 2 weeks. Now work on this and kind of prove out that this is something that people want to do. So at the end of 2 weeks, if they decided that this has wheels, this is something that people want to see, we just kept going until we decided that let's park this for a while. This isn't going anywhere anymore. So the things we kind of worked with were multi-screen interactions, machine learning things, virtual reality, augmented reality, just all future technology, a lot of the buzzwords in today's world, and seeing how we can actually put that into Adobe products. So it was a lot of fun at the time. Our manifesto was kind of create prototypes for future tools. And then the Adobe XD product team and the design team that was working on it reached out to me, and they said they wanted me to work with them kind of on the side, and I did do that. So I created these prototypes for their tool, and then I joined their team full-time, and I started creating tools for future prototypes. So in this whole sequence of events, I'm always kind of working on the 2 things that I really like to work on, and that's design tools and prototypes. So, to give a little bit more context, what is Adobe XD? Adobe XD is kind of a new age of Adobe products. It lets you prototype things and design things in the same product, and it lets you share things. That's kind of the fundamentals of what we're looking for in this, and it looks a lot different than most Adobe software you'll see. It's very clean. It's very focused. It's not going to get in your way. It's going to let you do what you wanted to do.