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Why Figma Wins

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Re: Why Figma Wins

#41

Post by corytheboyd »

doh wrote: post #24
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…

This is an interesting opinion. Can you share how would you design a proper structure so the above is not the case?

I have my own "perfect world" solution that I can shed some light on, sure. It's built to address the concerns that I myself have observed, so it might not apply to all. Never just blindly follow the advice of a stranger on the internet :)

Stop wasting time with high fidelity mocks. Engineers shouldn't need a picture perfect rendering of what product wants in order to implement it. The end result almost never ends up being an exact replication anyway for "reasons".

Start doing both of these in parallel: 1. Free up design to build systems that can be used to solve problems. Have them work closely with engineering to ensure the vision will carry ALL the way through to implementation 2. Lean very heavily on low fidelity mocks to hash out the SHAPE of changes to product (inspired by Basecamp https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02)

To use object oriented programming as an example, a design system is used in the concrete implementation of the abstract shape of the product requirement. When something doesn't fit into an existing abstraction, you refactor instead of fork.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#42

Post by satvikpendem »

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/

Re: Why Figma Wins

#43

Post by dyeje »

kaelig wrote: post #2

I championed the rollout of Figma at my company and what this article mentions is true: this is a tool for design, not just for designers. We initially thought we'd need to provision the same number of licenses as we did for Sketch/InVision/Abstract. Turns out way more people started to get involved in the design process and we now have a more inclusive design practice. Content strategists, UX developers, researchers…

This post encapsulates why Figma is winning, because there are thousands of teams doing this work dealing with the headaches of having design spread across multiple expensive tools. Figma just does it better.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#44

Post by emptysea »

corytheboyd wrote: post #35
mrpigeonpants wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Anecdote: at my current org the ideal we talk about is having a component library designed in Figma by the Designers and implemented by the engineers.

In reality Design doesn't use components and most pages end up being composed of a bunch of one-off components and we waste a ton of time.

As a side effect of this, the app design isn't consistent across pages because we aren't sharing components.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#45

Post by nailer »

Figma users: can it export CSS grid? Would love to start using autogenerated HTML/CSS but don't want to go back to 'display: block' and the hacks that invariably come with it.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#46

Post by corytheboyd »

emptysea wrote: post #44
corytheboyd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdote: at my current org the ideal we talk about is having a component library designed in Figma by the Designers and implemented by the engineers. In reality Design doesn't use components and most pages end up being composed of a bunch of one-off components and we waste a ton of time. As a side effect of this, the app design isn't consistent across pages because we aren't sharing components.

Yeah that is the exact result I have observed before as well. I'm really curious to hear more examples about how this actually works out well in the end from others.

I recognize that my view of this is from the bottom up in terms of only really having worked for SV startups, but I want to learn more and see if I can't make it work a bit differently this time.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#47

Post by gfodor »

vosper wrote: post #31

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…

Of course it’s leaky, but obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure.

Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#48

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I know and use both Sketch and Figma on a decent level, and I prefer Sketch over Figma. My only complaint to it is that it doesn't have Ubuntu version (I understand why, but still).

To me, is main advantage of Sketch was how many tiny things they got right (before Sketch, I was using Fireworks), and this combined volume of tiny improvements resulted a huge advancement of user experience.

Figma, on the other hand, innovated just one thing: made design online and collaborative. All other tiny niceties are mostly copied. So I prefer to support the guys who crack their heads and innovate.

I also think that Sketch team knows about their main disadvantage, so a web editor for it looks to be in the works.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#49

Post by davidivadavid »

greyswan wrote: post #39
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 sl…

I was going to say my experience is kind of the opposite — everyone seems to be waxing poetical about "design thinking" but UI work is more and more cut and paste. That being said, the "wrists" may just have moved one abstraction level higher, and they're parroting design thinking tropes (design sprints, etc.) instead of lower level ones.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#50

Post by mnkypete »

You know why it won for me? It had a Windows version from the start, so our team (Mac/Win) could actually get work done, since most other tools are Mac only.
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