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Why Figma Wins

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Re: Why Figma Wins

#31

Post by vosper »

We use Figma at work, and while it’s a nice tool I think it’s easy to fall (or maybe we just fell) into a kind of uncanny valley. The designs we get are close to realistic mockups of our actual UI, but are often not 100% there, and it’s the little deviations that can be quite distracting.

Engineer: So are we changing the nav icons as part of this story, too?

Designer: Oh, no, ignore that. I didn’t have our real icon set so I just grabbed some others

Engineer: This modal doesn’t look like our normal modal, are we supposed to be building a new one?

Designer: Oh, no, ignore that - I’m working on a design for a new modal and I just used that here

Engineer: Ok, do you know our current modal doesn’t support X, so this part of the interaction won’t work?

Designer: Oh, okay, I’ll go update the design I guess

Etc... sometimes makes me wish for the days of Balsamiq / sketch style designs where the idea was to not try to make it photorealistic.

Having said that I guess if you could get Figma completely in sync with your actual UI it’d be pretty nice.

EDIT: I will add that the clickable mockups seem really helpful for our Design team when they're doing user testing, which is happening before the designs get to us. But this is not unique to Figma, InVision can do it, too.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#32

Post by blululu »

Figma is a solid design tool for basic web/mobile apps, however I think that this post reads like a sales pitch more than an honest assessment of the product. The market for design tools is highly competitive, and the 'wins/winner take all' framework does not really apply here. Someone once remarked that every design tool is Photoshop and to a certain degree this is true. Consequently is is easy to clone/transpose the basic functionality/interactions and get teams to switch to a new product. (Think about the recent transition from Sketch to Figma). Companies like Adobe have done well by bundling a suite of complementary products to gain an edge however this is not trivial from a business perspective. Even with bundling the business is not winner take all. Figma is in many ways worse than Sketch, but collaboration is really helpful. That said, it is not that hard to spin up a competitor with React + Firebase in short order.

As much as Figma is in vogue right now, I would rather put money on Notion in the long term. Internal documentation has much higher switching costs than design tools. Notion already has excellent support for Management/Teamwork. They could easily roll out support for prototyping Mobile/Web apps and start eating into Figma's market share.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#33

Post by josefrichter »

Interesting opinions. But mostly opinions, not backed by any data. Those features that the author considers to be "winning bets", might not be winners at all. Actually some of them may be considered Figma's downsides and maybe it would grow faster having had done things differently..

It all may be down to being relatively reliable (not that common among design & prototyping tools) and keeping the right balance between adding some slightly advanced prototyping features and still keeping it overall rather simple. Obviously I don't know the truth. Just saying it might be just that, and people are happy with it despite being browser based and without anybody really needing collaborative designing..

Re: Why Figma Wins

#34

Post by [deleted] »

blululu wrote: post #32

Figma is a solid design tool for basic web/mobile apps, however I think that this post reads like a sales pitch more than an honest assessment of the product. The market for design tools is highly competitive, and the 'wins/winner take all' framework does not really apply here. Someone once remarked that every design tool is Photoshop and to a certain degree this is true. Consequently is is easy to clone/transpose th…

[deleted]

Re: Why Figma Wins

#35

Post by corytheboyd »

mrpigeonpants wrote: post #28
corytheboyd wrote: post #12

Not a comment about Figma really, but it has unfortunately become a trigger word for me. These are my observations from working with tech startup companies as a software engineer. Software solutions will never fix problems that are caused by people. Sketch, Figma, whatever the next design tool is. Google Docs, Quip, Notion. Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub/ZenHub, Jira. I've gone through tool-switching fatigue with al…

> Designers are frustrated because the systems they built are ignored. Designer here. My experience has been that Figma has done the opposite. It's created a lot of consistency with shared component libraries and standardized type / color styles. Also, the fact that engineers can jump into Figma and inspect CSS has been immensely helpful. In the design world, Figma is like the equivalent of getting a robust IDE with…

In your experience, do you know if engineers implement the shared component libraries as such in the actual applications? This would be as opposed to engineers directly implementing the end result of work in Figma (Sketch, etc.) that utilizes said components. There is a big difference there, and I'm always curious to have more data points about how this actually happens at other organizations.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#36

Post by scrollaway »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #27
hypewatch wrote: post #9

Figma sounds like a great tool, but it feels overhyped to me - especially in this article. This reads like a long-winded pitch to a Figma investor more than an honest review. I’ve been wanting to try it out but this article was a little bit of a turn off because it is so enthusiastic. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses so an article like this makes me wonder, what are the trade offs?

I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much. Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?

At a high level, that's about it, and it is huge. Sketch is macOS only. Hell, this page comes up when you google "sketch for ": https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/

Re: Why Figma Wins

#37

Post by wereHamster »

mostlyjason wrote: post #25

Our designers use Figma but the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts. Additionally the UX has tons of hidden features making it hard for non experts to discover how to do simple things like export mockups. As a result the designers have a backlog of small busy work changes instead of focusing on the key design questions. No one else has license…

> […] the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts

I completely agree.

I don't see the Figma files as an output that designers produce. I see it as a product on its own that people should be able to collaborate on.

I'm not going to stop a designer from sending me pull requests. In fact, for small mundane updates I'd LOVE it, since it would take this burden away from me. In fact, our inhouse designers all have GitHub accounts, so in theory they are able to.

But when I want to tweak a little thing in a Figma file, like adjust naming of the symbols, clean up icons, add more diverse examples of the content to document edge cases, or to have grounds for my next discussion with a designer or engineer, I'm not allowed to. Also quite often the thing that I want to do is not necessarily meant for designers, but for my fellow developers. Things like technical notes for implementation.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#38

Post by simonbarker87 »

I invested a lot of time a few years back learning to use Sketch and did really like it however half of our office are Windows so on a recent project where I took the lead on design (I'm a software engineer but it's a small team) I decided to use Figma and I was blown away, it was much easier to use than Sketch and I had to do very little Googling on how to achieve what I wanted. I then created the animations, shared it with the head of the team who would be using it, he gave me a few bits of feedback and I then shared it with the rest of my team with no OS related problems at all.

Since I've been on furlough for the last 3 months and working on a new app for myself I jumped back over to Sketch (since I have a licence and have invested in some plugins) and I have to say I do not like it anywhere near as much as Figma, at this point I've only stuck with Sketch because of the extras I have purchased for it, once I feel got my money's worth from them I'll be over to Figma for everything.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#39

Post by greyswan »

corytheboyd wrote: post #12

Not a comment about Figma really, but it has unfortunately become a trigger word for me. These are my observations from working with tech startup companies as a software engineer. Software solutions will never fix problems that are caused by people. Sketch, Figma, whatever the next design tool is. Google Docs, Quip, Notion. Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub/ZenHub, Jira. I've gone through tool-switching fatigue with al…

My uncle had a successful career in advertising. He would always say to me, "don't be just a wrist." He meant participate in guiding the concept and strategy instead of just being an execution person.

I've been in the design industry for 15 years now. When I was starting out, there was a flurry of philosophizing about design. There was a belief that designers should focus on solving problems instead of just making slick UIs. I don't see that discussion anymore. I see a bunch of "wrists" arguing over which pencil is best.

Maybe I'm just an aging curmudgeon...

Re: Why Figma Wins

#40

Post by satvikpendem »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #27
hypewatch wrote: post #9

Figma sounds like a great tool, but it feels overhyped to me - especially in this article. This reads like a long-winded pitch to a Figma investor more than an honest review. I’ve been wanting to try it out but this article was a little bit of a turn off because it is so enthusiastic. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses so an article like this makes me wonder, what are the trade offs?

I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much. Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?

Figma approaches design from an engineer's perspective. They have features like auto layout [0], swapping elements in a list, scaling multiple elements at once while preserving each aspect ratio, and so on.

Can you imagine that if designers before this wanted to move an element in a list, they would have to move every single one instead of having some drag and drop swap functionality? That if they wanted to dynamically change a button size for the text inside it, like we can do easily on the web, they simply couldn't?

Basically, Figma is turning design more into something like front-end development, doing things in a design program that engineers could do normally with code. This is because the developers of Figma are themselves coders rather than designers, so they know what real ease of use should look like (ironically). This is the fundamental corporate culture shift that is the difference between Figma and others like Sketch.

Of course, you could go all the way and simply turn the design software into a web/mobile development framework, which is what software like Framer [1] does, which is literally a design software built on React, and it can spit out React code for you once you're done designing.

[0] https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/

[1] https://www.framer.com/

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