Adobe XD (short for Experience Design) is a design tool from Adobe for laying out the screens of an app or website and wiring them into a clickable prototype. Designers used it to draw interfaces, set up reusable components, and then link screens so a stakeholder could click through the flow before any code was written.
Think of it as a digital storyboard for software. Instead of describing a checkout flow in a document, a designer builds each screen in XD and connects the buttons, so a client can tap through the journey on a phone and feel how it works. That made it a close competitor to Figma and Sketch for prototyping and UI work.
When did you reach for XD over the others? Teams already paying for Adobe Creative Cloud often picked it because it sat alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in one subscription, and its repeat-grid feature for filling a list with sample data was genuinely handy. But it always lagged Figma on the one thing that mattered most, two designers editing the same file at the same time.
The important context is that XD’s story has largely ended. Adobe planned to merge with Figma, paused XD’s roadmap, and then the deal collapsed in 2023, leaving the tool in maintenance mode with no new features. Plenty of older projects still live in XD files, but new work has shifted elsewhere, and that drift is unlikely to reverse.
At TopDevs we work mostly from Figma files these days, so when a client arrives with legacy XD designs we help them move the screens into a tool that is still actively supported.
