Adobe Spaces for XD

Overview

From September 2021 to March 2022, I redesigned the XD mobile app (a prototype viewing application) in order to accommodate the comprehensive Adobe Spaces experience planned for Adobe's Creative Suite. Adobe Spaces was an initiative aimed at making it easier for creative teams to collaborate and manage their work with others through a centralized repository of their creative files, libraries, and links across Adobe's suite of product offerings. The feature beta launched at the annual Adobe Max Conference.

My role

Designer
Prototyper
Design systems

Platforms

Mobile

Year

2021-2022

A little context

Adobe recognized that creative teams often struggle with disorganized workflows, scattered files, outdated versions, and limited access to the right tools. These inefficiencies slow progress and stifle collaboration—especially when team members lack quick access to key resources. To solve these challenges, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud Spaces, a centralized workspace where everyone can seamlessly gather, manage, and share project essentials. You can think of a space as a shared digital hub for your team, where all the creative work and resources live in one place, ensuring that everyone (i.e., designers, product managers, executives, etc.) stays aligned. Within a space, you can add creative files, share libraries to maintain design consistency, and post links to everything from documentation to task boards. As new team members join, simply invite them to the relevant spaces, giving them immediate access to all the files, libraries, and links needed to get started.

In order to implement the Spaces functionality across Adobe's suite of products, the company created a inter-org working group that drove the design of the Spaces core experiences and features. Additionally, each product offering (i.e., XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) would appoint design liaisons who would serve as consultants in ensuring that the unified Spaces experience wouldn't disrupt essential aspects of their own respective products. Along with my design manager, I served as a design liaison for the XD product vertical. I was the main point-of-contact for defining the experience for the inclusion of the Spaces functionality in the XD mobile app.

XD's mobile app was primarily for viewing prototypes and other creative documents created within XD. However the inclusion of Spaces functionality meant that the app would need to also accommodate additional features. Particularly the ability to navigate subscribed Spaces (file repositories) and open elements contained therein. To address these evolving requirements, we reimagined the app’s information architecture to deliver a more intuitive and streamlined user experience.

Refining our proposal

Our initial approach was to utilize the existing XD property inspector UI and have playback occur on artboards. Unfortunately, once we began socializing our designs with our cross functional partners three primary issues came to the fore: complexity, technical debt, and conflicts with our release timeline.

Adobe Spectrum Design System

I based the majority of the redesign on pre-existing patterns available from our organizations design system, Spectrum. This allowed for less negotiation of visual styling and interaction patterns. The other benefit was occasional cost reduction through usage of existing engineering efforts.

Content Strategy User Testing Evaluation

Since the redesign was based on patterns already means tested the primary issue to resolve in the proposal was in language and information architecture. I partnered with content strategists to conduct a test of language we planned to use since there were discrepancies between teams in referring to elements.

Organizational Socializing

As a design partner proposing a unique Spaces experience the onus was on me to socialize my proposal and establish buy-in from other relevant partners.

Improving collaboration among creative teams through centralized content management