Adobe XD

So if you're familiar with the design packs already, you'll know that we used Adobe Photoshop originally.

Then we moved to Adobe XD because it lets us do a lot more in one file.

And then here recently, we've just moved to a program called Figma.

Figma is a lot like Adobe XD.

Originally, it's a prototyping tool to make UX and UI design with, to design websites and apps with.

But I've kind of taken it and retooled it to do some other things.

And so we would then layer on and say, okay, well, we're probably going to target mostly the category aware people because there's just not that many of the category unaware.

Almost all the UX designers are probably using something like Adobe XD or Sketch.

And so this right here, when we're looking about segmentation, this second aspect of Are the people that you're going after aware of the category or not is something that we never see on anyone's ICP definitions.

And yet from a positioning perspective, it's probably one of the most important elements of what's going to make the narrative work or not work.

How do

you figure that out? What kind of signal should founders pick up on when they're talking to potential customers of whether they are category aware?

Yeah, so there's the really easy litmus test is if you said to a designer, can you name one or two interface design tools? And if they say, oh yeah, you mean like Adobe XD? Or if they say like, oh, you mean like Sketch? Then they're category aware.

If they say interface design tool, what do you mean exactly? Like what are you referring to? That means they're not category aware.

So for a while, that's what happened.

Now, what happened was that Adobe got in the game with Adobe XD.

So when I was at Adobe, there was this rule where you couldn't start a new product unless it was pretty much guaranteed to make $100 million in revenue from the beginning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

you can't just ship in one language it has to ship in 20 languages right even version one right so they have these fixed costs and so the ux space was not big enough for them right but then things changed at adobe they went through a rough patch etc etc their products are very mature this ux thing is growing and growing they saw that there were a couple of companies doing pretty well and So I think they lowered that threshold, and they started with these other products.

So Adobe XD is a great product.

I've only used it once or twice.

So try to understand to build a prototype because even the pathway to building a visual prototype to make sure that your vision is in alignment with the stakeholders vision, you know, that's a process that used to take weeks, if not months to really lay out.

You had Adobe experience design, Adobe XD.

You have a lot of products that are built just to get to that prototyping.

for vision alignment first, but when it comes to building viable artifacts for your final output, that is a very big different thing than prototyping, but prototyping has its value, right? It's to make sure that your vision and what the stakeholders want is in alignment.