Why Figma Wins • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Figma Wins

#71

Post by vosper » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #47

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.

> obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure.

That's a fair comment.

> Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers.

I think most good teams have had engineers talking to designers since well before Figma :)

Re: Why Figma Wins

#72

Post by federico3 » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

Figma does not seem to tie into the OS UI primitives.

What is the experience for visually-impaired users that need high contrast UIs or braille terminals?

Re: Why Figma Wins

#73

Post by cynusx » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

memexy wrote: post #69

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?

Ya but you're probably taking certain things for granted that the author is not. The author thinks Figma really is amazing because it enables what they called "loop stacking" in the article. For programmers this is no big deal, programmers work with dynamic workflows and loops all the time. So if you're a programmer then I can see why you'd think it's overhyped but for most people it really is an amazing tool because…

> It sounds like Figma reduces friction in the collaboration process by clever use of cloud based and browser coordination. It's not innovative but it's a good application of existing technology to the design space.

Out of curiosity, what do you consider innovative?

Re: Why Figma Wins

#74

Post by eyerony » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

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…

I've had some success in agile-style places pushing for separate story pointing of special-snowflake bullshit design. Like:

"This feature's a 3 if we just do it with native elements or and/or existing UI guidelines, but it's another 5 story on top of that if you really need this ugly crap you're insisting on that'll bloat our bundle by a ton, likely be fragile in a variety of ways, and, realistically, probably have some a11y and cross-platform issues even with a "5" of effort put in."

Suddenly they don't really need it that much, and if they do, well, they have only themselves to blame when "not much" gets done this sprint. Congrats, you just saved them money and (probably) improved the UX and maintainability of the project. Every now and then they'll really insist, which is fine, but if you've got someone who's picking their (let's face it, usually terrible) glittery UI ideas over features & bugfixes more than very occasionally then the project's probably doomed, so at least that becomes clear really fast and you've got numbers to point to if shit gets toxic and the blame-game starts (you did document it, right?)

Re: Why Figma Wins

#75

Post by jessaustin » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

i_s wrote: post #60

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…

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.

This is a failure mode I've seen before in other distributed collaboration situations: there is a giant artifact that either clueless participants or homeless tools force everyone to carefully reexamine every time a change is made. If Figma really were all that I guess it would accommodate the futuristic technology called "diffs". Even if your excellent extension idea weren't available, ISTM designers should just maintain a current representation of production in Figma if only to themselves have some idea what's going on.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#76

Post by sbierwagen » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

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…

$45 per month is too expensive?

Re: Why Figma Wins

#77

Post by coderintherye » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

Could any designers here explain why they use Figma instead of Invision?

I used Invision before and loved it (as a developer) for collaborating on creating mockups and putting them into reality.

Now working with a team that uses Figma and helping them create prototypes is...painful. It seems great for creating the design itself but prototyping has been way harder with it than in Invision. I'm wondering if maybe we're just unfamiliar with the right way to use that part of the tool.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#78

Post by arkitaip » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

coderintherye wrote: post #77

Could any designers here explain why they use Figma instead of Invision? I used Invision before and loved it (as a developer) for collaborating on creating mockups and putting them into reality. Now working with a team that uses Figma and helping them create prototypes is...painful. It seems great for creating the design itself but prototyping has been way harder with it than in Invision. I'm wondering if maybe we're…

I've been sketching, prototyping and designing UI for years and I just don't get Figma. It's just baffles me that people would work on this level of granularity (let's draw everything from scratch) instead of working with UI elements like buttons, text fields, etc. I feel like I'm missing something very fundamentally about Figma because every time I've used it I leave confused and frustrated.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#79

Post by hypewatch » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

memexy wrote: post #69

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?

Ya but you're probably taking certain things for granted that the author is not. The author thinks Figma really is amazing because it enables what they called "loop stacking" in the article. For programmers this is no big deal, programmers work with dynamic workflows and loops all the time. So if you're a programmer then I can see why you'd think it's overhyped but for most people it really is an amazing tool because…

Yeah I’m a programmer, so I think you could be right. I’d like to work with our designer using figma and get her thoughts / opinions to get a better understanding.

Also, because I’m a programmer, I’ve lived through many tech hype cycles (with mostly open source and developer tools). So over time I’ve become sensitive to this kind of rhetoric. That’s why my initial reaction was skepticism.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#80

Post by gfodor » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

vosper wrote: post #71

gfodor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure. That's a fair comment. > Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers. I think most good teams have had engineers talking to designers since well before Figma :)

Ah yep of course, I’m just pointing out that those kinds of back-and-forths, Figma derived or not, are a sign of a healthy org. A lack of grumbling around miscommunication often means that no communication is happening, not that it’s going swimmingly.