I've updated the panel plugin for notes using React if anyone would like to contribute. Github repo has XDX file for installation.

The plugin was also just accepted by Adobe! It's available in the plug-in manager as Spec Notes 1.

https://github.com/marcuswingate/spec-notes-plugin-xd

Yes, please add this. I need a way to create notes for the dev team.

I support this idea!

The current Design Spec capabilities are helpful for communicating how a design looks, but not how it works. We need the ability to provide this information in some way...commonly done through annotations like this.

Examples:
Communicating what the default value of a control should be, does it have hint text?
Under what conditions is a control disabled?
Describing conditional logic. (Button goes to Page A in one case, Page B in another).

Historically, this has been accomplished with simple notes on a spec. Design specs in XD would be more valuable with some way to communicate that information.

If anyone is interested, I've started building a plugin for adding a Notes panel for Artboards and Groups. It's in the early stages, but I hope it can be helpful to solving this issue.

https://github.com/marcuswingate/notes-plugin-xd

Great and fantastic! It should 100% be like you designed it! You should take a leading position at Adobe!

+1. We're finding not being able to add functional spec into the design problematic for our workflow. Using the commenting functionality to do so in Review mode, doesn't work as final decisions can get buried down in the comments.

As designers we need to be able to clearly articulate final spec separately. Being able to do this in the context of the design/wireframe as annotations is invaluable in conveying these to developers.

This seems to be an obvious missing piece to making XD a more effective collaboration tool.

Is there any update as to whether or not this is on the product roadmap or being evaluated as a feature for inclusion in future versions?

Making a distinction between designers annotations and reviewer's comments is important.

Designer's annotations should appear alongside reviewer's comments in the web prototype, but should persist when a new link is generated. Agree that this would make most sense as a third view (i.e. parallel with design and prototype modes)

ABSOLUTELY. Great feature, would love to see it ASAP.

To allow designers to make comments related to development/copywriting/interactions etc. as they're designing, without having to share for review, wait for it to upload and then add comments in the online link.

WE NEED ANNOTATIONS!

Some way to hide/unhide a notes layer of some sort for developers to see, when they review what we export for them from XD.

When designing in Photoshop, I include a lot of info/notes for devs - I export a clean, pixel-perfect version of a page and also the ConDoc (Construction Documents) version that may have tons of notes and arrows all over it.

The artboards and prototypes are great, but as a UX Designer who works with both local and remote developers, a lot gets lost in translation. The ability to add notes to both design specs and prototypes to entire art-boards, as well as on specific objects on those art-boards, would be amazingly helpful. Not only would it give me the ability to call out animations (particularly when 'auto-animate' is not animating everything on the page as intended), but it would also allow me to call attention to specific nuances that developers may not notice when moving quickly through the specs. It would also allow me to note specific conditions, use-cases, etc. I also love the idea of being able to share prototypes/specs with OR without the comments (as suggested by another commenter on this post). So when I'm just presenting to the design team, the view is less cluttered/distracting.

Also, it'd be ideal to have an export option to include/exclude notes by category (not just always include) because sometimes when routing a project, one team needs to see all notes while others should not see any notes.

This would be great. Right now we use commenting, but having huge problems as project becomes more complex, and several revisions take place. Would be great to have comments attached to the actual file, rather than to the exported Specs.

nice

This would be great for adding notes about animations that have to be built into the pages but could never be supported in XD itself.

Absolutely need this! There are so many methods I use to create graphical work in designs that requires back and forth with front end developers to ensure it's displayed 100% the way I intended. A lot of this could be avoided with having notes on elements.

Acrobat already has a comment system similar to what it seems like is requested for this.

My suggestions:
- Have the ability to right click on a UI element/symbol/grouped object/artboard etc and add a comment
- Able to see on the layers panel next to the batch export icon weather the object has a comment on it.
- Show who did it and when a comment was made, (may want to include in that timeline feature that's currently being worked on).
- Add the comments to the list of comments on the Design Speck layout.
- Automatically add a "pin" element on the object the comment relates to.

Also it would be great if I could insert a link int this notes/comment field. For example if I'd like to add some examples or link to my spec document, it would be useful if link is link, not plain text.

This sounds like a great idea. Currently, I'm making artboards in between my artboards with the number of the user story (VSTS) the design is connected to and a status(done, in progress, etc). There must be a more convenient way to collaborate between design and development.