Everything in this article makes sense to me. But sadly, I don’t know how useful it is to the aspiring founders who are trying to build a product right now. It’s relatively straightforward to see Figma’s success depended on these reasons but what will drive the success of the products that are getting built from scratch right now? I would love to see someone point out technical decision like “browser-first experience” but in 2020 version that’s fundamentally different from what everyone else is doing but will make sense in 2025 in retrospect.
Why Figma Wins
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: Why Figma Wins
#52Not 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…
The best case I ever found was insisting that designers and developers sit together without much PM interference. The unplanned communication and collaboration ended up producing gold.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#53Earlier 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.
Some do, sometimes relying on things like Storybook.js to do QA in the middle. There's more and more things to maintain consistency between Figma design and e.g. React components being built.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#54We 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…
Been there, done that. Usually is because you need stronger design/front-end glue (front-end developers with higher than average design skills).
Re: Why Figma Wins
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share different screens and version them.
That leaves versioning on designers side which means designer is the only one who can confirm the changes. This can lead to misunderstandings.
unclear what you mean by "designer is the only one who can confirm the changes".
hopefully, I would assume there will be additional documentation that refers to a certain version that is approved
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> That leaves versioning on designers side
how was versioning the designs prior to Figma? whose responsibility was it?
Re: Why Figma Wins
#56Not 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…
I thought the Waterfall process was primarily an Agency/Marketing thing, with Tech Startups focusing more on a level playing field where most have input and touch the final product.
This is where I believe these products are focused on, essentially agencies try to get sign-off from clients before they begin work, and the better they can show what the final product (and processes) will be like, the better.
Edit: Yes the Waterfall sucks, especially if you're at the bottom.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#57I don’t think Figma winning is all that complicated. Designing for the web and mobile is more dynamic now. Designers are expected to show their ideas and produce interactive prototypes. No other design tool has the level of prototype control that Figma does.
Figma is very bad for illustration, but as the industry has killed off any semblance of art or technique this doesn’t matter. What does matter is producing something clickable and animated.
So Figma wins because it’s designed to solve the problem designers have now. Not 10 years ago like Sketch.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#58Meh. Everybody knew that "design is not just for designers" for quite a while, Adobe made several failed attempts at "collaboration" workflows trying to solve exactly those kinds of problems. This is just post-hoc justification... and also, let's not jump ahead of ourselves, "Figma wins" is not a foregone conclusion. A few years ago it would've been "why Sketch wins".
Everyone knew cgroups and jails and sandboxes for a long time before Docker happened, still only Docker made these concepts popular for the masses.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#59We 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…
I've encountered this as well. I am a proponent of just using low fidelity shapes for mocks instead of high fidelity renderings of what it should actually look like.
If you put enough work into the design system, and implemented it well for use in code, all you should NEED is a low fidelity shape telling you where to put existing components, and how to string them together. Everyone already knows what a modal looks like, behaves like, etc. they don't need it designed for them every time it comes up. That just wastes everyone's time.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#60We 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…
Yea, we've had the same problem. I've started to ask our designer just show the thing that should be changed, with 0 other context.
An idea for Figma to mitigate this problem: make a browser extension that can export pages to figma documents. That would make it much easier to have up-to-date designs when doing web development.