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Why Figma Wins

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Re: Why Figma Wins

#141

Post by Stevvo »

SenHeng wrote: post #91
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…

That’s not figma’s fault, that’s a team communication and workflow issue. We have that at work too and the solution is to communicate. Have a big red box with text saying the modal is not ready, or simply don’t have a modal until it’s ready. Better stick, create placeholder components and use those. Replace when ready.

Agreed. In my company, your responsibility as a developer is to implement the design as shown on figma, pixel perfect. If something is incorrect on the design, someone will usually have noticed it and fixed it before I get the chance, because there are 4 sets of eyes on it (CTO, PM, Designers, Developer)

Re: Why Figma Wins

#142

Post by mch82 »

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

Licensing models that don’t scale can cause tremendous problems. Early on, design can become a bottleneck. Later, simple changes might be rejected because the cost of redesign is too high. In the worst cases, developers will work ahead of design to meet deadlines (since not every team can afford an expert in the design tool) and the resulting variances will be challenging to reconcile/resolve.

Expensive, high learning curve tools can introduce silos and bottlenecks into an organization.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#143

Post by wh-uws »

cm2012 wrote: post #104
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…

Here's the thing: higher ups, more often than not, have no imagination. If your mock-up is not explicit and realistic, you'll get complaints and worries that it's not polished or that not a lot of work went into it.

Higher ups have imagination... its just not used the way you are thinking...

Their imagination is running wild that the mockup being used in the presentation to them means its an unknown time until its ready to ship..

They are imagining that is past whatever deadline they have in mind for it lol

Re: Why Figma Wins

#144

Post by waheoo »

Stevvo wrote: post #141
SenHeng wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not figma’s fault, that’s a team communication and workflow issue. We have that at work too and the solution is to communicate. Have a big red box with text saying the modal is not ready, or simply don’t have a modal until it’s ready. Better stick, create placeholder components and use those. Replace when ready.

Agreed. In my company, your responsibility as a developer is to implement the design as shown on figma, pixel perfect. If something is incorrect on the design, someone will usually have noticed it and fixed it before I get the chance, because there are 4 sets of eyes on it (CTO, PM, Designers, Developer)

I hope this is sarcasm.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#145

Post by satvikpendem »

taharvey wrote: post #126
satvikpendem wrote: post #42

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 dynamical…

Figma approaches design from an investors point of view. Like most other web-SaaS tools, they aren't browser based because its better for the user. They sacrifice speed, native functionality, and usability for owning via server-side control over your wallet on a subscription plan. The startup market in no-longer customer driven. It is investor thesis driven.

That is an odd way to put it if you had read the article. It notes that precisely because Figma was on the web that it was able to have collaboration features, have linkability to specific Figma files, and other such features, and thus serve the customer. As well, I am not sure how they sacrifice speed or usability exactly, when they even use Rust compiled to WASM in order to create the entire UI.

I can concede that SaaS can be, in many cases, be merely investor driven, but I cannot concede that Figma is one of those. Even being investor driven, such as having a subscription business plan, is not bad for the customer per se, as a sustainable business is better than a dead one. Software costs money to make, and more importantly, to upkeep and add features too. I am not sure how you can expect one time fees, especially for enterprise software like Figma is (personal plans are free), in this day and age.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#146

Post by Tcepsa »

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…

It's not just Figma; a project that I'm on has been having basically the same challenges with Sketch/Sympli, and Axure before that. Breaking it into two separate "wireframe" and "mockup" steps has helped, but folks are still rushing to the "mockup" step too soon IMO; lots of things that could have been caught in the wireframe stage are still having to be corrected in the mockup stage instead, pretty much as described by parent. It's a fairly recent change for us, though, so I am hoping that things will get better with practice.

Personally, I'd rather just implement the wireframe (or something like it) and try to iron out the interaction wrinkles there where it's much easier to update the design and you don't have to worry about fonts and spacing nearly as much; once the interaction implementation is nailed down, then I think it's a better time to move on to the mockup. Hopefully we'll get an opportunity to try this at some point, but it was enough of a struggle to do a separate wireframe at all that I'm guessing it'll take awhile ;-)

Re: Why Figma Wins

#147

Post by PascLeRasc »

sizzle wrote: post #130

Can anyone explain why adobe XD's platform isn't dominating the design tools discussion? They keep improving it with the backing of Adobe (army of devs) and the expertise of creative cloud, along with their community design plugins and remote collab features they just added to the platform. I'm able to quickly mock up designs with ease.

I think you hit the nail on the head why they're not winning - no one wants Creative Cloud.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#148

Post by tambourine_man »

shwoopdiwoop wrote: post #120
tambourine_man wrote: post #82

Does anyone actually like using Figma? Honest question. I’ve use it for collaboration a few times but found it painful. I’d much rather have used Photoshop and screen sharing if given the choice. I understand that this solution doesn’t scale though.

Not in a hundred years could I imagine going back to Photoshop for doing product design. Figma is a joy to use. Photoshop is a slow, clunky thing of the past in this particular field of design.

Interesting, to me Figma is dog slow, feature poor… I can’t imagine why people would use it.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#149

Post by lowercased »

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…

had a 200 screen mockup in invision handed to me. it was obvious that a few different teams at the design agency had worked on it:

screens 1-25 had a certain nav bar

26-39 had the same nav bar, but everything a few pixels off with a slightly smaller font in off-white, vs white.

screens 40-70 alternated between the first to nav bars, and introduced pull down select boxes with multiple checkboxes in them. the multiple checkboxes represented - in some cases mutually exclusive combinations of things which contrasted with other nav options.

... and so on. Things had to look pixel-perfect - "look, it's a design agency, they put a lot of work in to thinking about how this is supposed to look and work". So.. you'd make the screens exactly the same ('just export all the CSS for each page', etc). But then, when using the app in development, if you went between various screens, and saw the discrepancies - font sizes changes in nav, for example - that caused more negative feedback - "this is broken!".

I tried to demonstrate the design screens were the problem themselves by just paginating between the invision slides - you could see the font sizes jump/change immediately. "now you're just being negative".

I didn't last very long on that project...

Re: Why Figma Wins

#150

Post by josefrichter »

satvikpendem wrote: post #42

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 dynamical…

Framer doesn't spit out React code once you're done. Code used in prototyping is hugely different and unusable in production. And Framer makers know this and openly talk about this, they're not trying to be a code generator.
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