The same for us. The spec view with flow lines was very helpful! Now is gone.. Few days before the release with this change I was pointing out to one of our designer, that the way how to see "higher" view with flow arrows is great and something which is not in other tools. Now bang and is gone. Suprised with the decision removing this type of view from specification at all.

Please check out this Feature Request and vote up and comment if you agree (Similar topic):

https://adobexd.uservoice.com/forums/353007-adobe-xd-feature-requests/suggestions/38147434-switch-between-grid-and-flow-view-for-share-for-de

Please go to this Feature Request and vote up and comment (Same topic):

https://adobexd.uservoice.com/forums/353007-adobe-xd-feature-requests/suggestions/38147434-switch-between-grid-and-flow-view-for-share-for-de

Hi Arun,

I'm sure you've heard the feedback that the transition to this new layout could have been made better so I'll just tell you where myself and a few other designers are affected by this change.

Each designer will use a personal taxonomy/organizational structure within their XD projects and how they arrange the art boards. Having this reflected to developers allowed us to compartmentalize workflows, user stories and in some cases mobile vs web treatments.

With this feature removed and a flat grid view, there is no sense of hierarchy so developers feel lost and don't have an immediate sense of how things are connected. I realize there is the mouse-over treatment to show the linked screens, but that's not necessarily good enough. For developers coming from xcode they could understand the storyboard-like interface and it made it easy to work together.

This hand-off detail is actually a very big deal for those of us working with developers and one of the primary reasons I decided to shift from Sketch to XD.

Thanks and please let us know when you think this will be resolved

We need the old 'flow' view back ASAP please!! Keep the new one too, but give us a way to toggle between them. Some of our projects have more complex flows (130+ boards and growing), so we need to visually group them together so it's easier for the dev team to see and for us to demo to stakeholders. Plus it's quicker to jump to a screen you need, rather than scrolling through an unidentifiable page of boxes. This just made things waaaay more difficult for me and my team :(

+1

I do like the new grid view for quick navigation but the old layout was useful for overall flow. This is one of the main reasons we prefer XD over invision.

Please bring back the old specifications view when sharing for development. The advantage the old view had over the grid view is that the developers & stakeholders can see how the screens are grouped together as features and how they are meant to flow with each other.

In the new grid view you lose all of that and get a grid of screens where its hard to see where one feature begins or ends. I see you can view the linked screens but that is really not enough.

To answer Arun Kaza's question. I think I would be beneficial to have a toggle to switch between grid and flow.

The way we used the flow view was to represent the full system flow, organized by the artboard layout, which is preference based. This is perfect for understanding the flow and dependencies, especially when features are more dependent than just "where does this take me next". This is critical for communication of complex features.

The flow can be used in place of a site / system map. The grid does not show flow nor depth.

This is one of those decisions that makes teams start looking at other software tools.

True! It's unorganized

Hate the new grid - all my devs (about 55 of them) were very confused!! Please re-instate the flow view :)

please reverse to the previous flow view. Grid view does not provide any additional value. It was one of the best features to be able to see the file on the browser just like you have arranged artboards in the actual file. Now it is confusing and developers are struggling.

Hello, I'm having problems with my developers. in the old days we found the drawings of the clipboards easy, because we separated the files in columns ..... to facilitate the location, since we have 280 clipboards in total. Now it's all gone and we can not find anything. Please just add an example button: Grid View, XD View, this would make it easier to view. See example image.

Developers were confused by this change. Grid View was the worst change that was made, how do I display all the clipboards faithfully to my document?

Just saw the updated specs and it's really bad. Before we could organize our artboards the way we wanted, and the way we would organize them inside the file would be visible in the specs we shared with the developers, and they would have nicely organized artboards. Now everything is a nonsense grid, I have the normal states artboard of a web page on one row, and the hovers artboard of the same page 2 rows under. Why in the world would you do this to us? Please test your ideas before rolling them out, you can ruin a great app with these ridiculous changes...

One might say that developers don't need to see how physically large screens relatively are – they should just start coding... ;-)
But the relative geometry of the screens, their perceived grouping and its mapped overview, it all helps to give more insight in the project as a whole, to oversee its scope, and the separate screens their relative dimensions. Also for developers.

And It helps to prevent silly mistakes in communicating about it:
"Take note of that section of larger iPhone 8+ designs on the left." – "Section on the left ? Which larger design ?"

So the jump from the sheer ergonomics of an overview to a rigid grid of similarly sized icons and names is too cruel. Offer both, offer a choice in the top bar, a preference, whatever. But don't throw away this valuable visual cue. Developers are still humans – not robots.

What on earth has happened to the way artboards are shown in design specs now? They don't match my XD document at all like they used to, instead of actually showing my artboard setup on index the way they are layed out in XD, all artboards are now shown one after the other and the board layout is not included anymore. Now I have developers and stakeholders asking me about the order of things in design specs cause there's no system. All they see is a bunch of artboards and it doesn't mirror the way the artboards are layed out in XD anymore. Do you know how frustrating it is trying to get a birds perspective of the userflow with 256 artboards when they are re-stacked and suddenly presented one after the other with no correspondence to how it's supposed to look in XD? It's an impossible task. Dear Adobe, please do not alter or change anything when you don't know the designers way of work. This is totally pointless and messes up everything. Couldn't you at least kept a button with the chance to see things as they were intended in XD? Or give us the chance to manually move the artboards into sections that we could add text labels to? Just like you can in Zeplin. You just went ahead and changed the whole concept with no option to see stuff the original way. Please tell me this is a terrible mistake or a bug. Surely you can't be doing this with intent?

For my point of view, to enhance the Grid view mode, you should provide the ability to group screens by their functionalities.
For instance:
- Login 2 screens
- Home 4 screens
It's easy for user to find the screen.

Hi, I have a problem with Grid view of all artboards in Design Specs, I organized screen as groups of features like image below. It's easy for me to present the overview of system to my team as well as customer, and developers can easily look for screens' spec for developing by group of feature.
There should be another view mode to see all artboards as you see them in Adobe XD or a view mode for groups of screens?

Why doesn't the Adobe team ever do user-testing before making changes to such critical features? What is wrong with you people?

Just last month you destroyed the prototype-linking feature and faced a major uproar. In this release, you've fixed it but created another new annoying half-baked feature that will send our existing projects into a spiral.

As others have said, please give us an option to switch to the original view.

For the current new design to work, you need to at least allow users to break sections between the list to make sense of it (like Zeplin).

Please, please introduce user testing in your process.