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Figma: The product design team’s process

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Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#21

Post by deathtrader666 »

preommr wrote: post #14
base698 wrote: post #3

For anyone doing design work, even if adjacent, it's hard to impress upon how amazing Figma is as a tool. It excels not just as a design tool, but collaboration and prototyping as well.

Figma is an absolutely awful design tool that has great collaboration features. For a UI/UX design tool it has terrible constraints, and basically no support for state changes. There's variances now, which came out really recently. Before that, it was even worse. People would have separate designs for each possible state. Let alone how limited the possible actions are. It's just frames, boxes, and vector elements. An…

Would you say that Framer fares better than Figma?

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#22

Post by xyzelement »

corytheboyd wrote: post #6
runawaybottle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about who would actually take a designer’s problems seriously and solve them. It would be a designer that can also program, no one else is going to give a shit or even recognize what needs to be solved. By sheer necessity, someone like this had to emerge.

I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine. I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer. Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here. Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all…

>> I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer.

For what it's worth, a personal anecdote - I didn't work with UX people or product managers until after I spent ~12 or so years as a developer/development manager.

My first impression of UX and PdMs was "wait, that's a job? This is stuff I expect my engineers to do. I wouldn't let my engineers get away without understanding the business or not obsess about the user experience."

Ironically I am now a product manager and what I have learned is that the answer is very simple: "perfect engineers (using your definition) are FUCKING RARE." In a startup you probably can structure your org around a handful of them, but by the time you're say Google-size (and way smaller than that) if your demands for a dev is "must be great at UX/business too" you just won't hire that many people, so you allow yourself to scale by breaking out the roles instead.

I miss the days of doing it all and try to get into it as much as I can, but I can't recommend that as a company strategy.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#23

Post by mattlondon »

ksec wrote: post #20

Off Topic: This website stores data such as cookies to enable necessary site functionality, including analytics, targeting, and personalisation. By remaining on this website you indicate your consent. The above is shown as Banner that does not require any user interaction before you indicate your consent. This may have been OK if it was in US, but I was under the impression with GDPR, or pretty much everything else i…

Agreed - I also question if analytics, targeting and personalisation is "necessary"?

In my mind, only cookies for things like Auth and session handle are necessary.

But I am not a lawyer or expert.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#24

Post by [deleted] »

ksec wrote: post #20

Off Topic: This website stores data such as cookies to enable necessary site functionality, including analytics, targeting, and personalisation. By remaining on this website you indicate your consent. The above is shown as Banner that does not require any user interaction before you indicate your consent. This may have been OK if it was in US, but I was under the impression with GDPR, or pretty much everything else i…

[deleted]

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#25

Post by brudgers »

runawaybottle wrote: post #4
bjeds wrote: post #2

I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with. It still boggles my mind that the same person can: (1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs an…

Think about who would actually take a designer’s problems seriously and solve them. It would be a designer that can also program, no one else is going to give a shit or even recognize what needs to be solved. By sheer necessity, someone like this had to emerge.

It makes sense. Craftspeople make their own tools. The better the tools a craftsperson can make the better the craft. And in design, the more skilled the designer the better tools they will design because designing tools is ‘just’ design.

At the edges there are not enough people for off the shelf solutions. And doing it yourself is more productive than shopping for a silver bullet.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#26

Post by nbzso »

Design in a classical sense is dead. There is no real incentive for real deep design to happen. In a race with the clock, multiple points of view, collaboration design, standardization of ui by style libraries and UX design overhead, the soul of design as a process is lost. I am classically trained designer with more than 20 year practice, I have been in many roles, from PD trough Project Management, business owner, etc. Design field today is flooded with self entitlement and low level knowledge, empty words and pretentious jargon, in the end the products are similar visually and rarely innovative. Boring. Recently I closed all business and started clear frontend development work. In implementation things are more meaningful and can be data driven, I don’t have to “romanticize”, be a “designer who writes”, “communicates with clients” and “brings added brand value by using social media”. In general I love design and selling it as a service is to consciously devaluate years of work and experience. At least in front end implementation craftsmanship is monetary rewarded more than design and I don’t have to be a “culture fit” or likable person. Front-end development is measurable skill, clients and employers are rarely competent to comprehend good design. Figma is a tool, it has a value in collaboration. As a graphic design platform it lacks depth and lots of detail oriented features, Sketch was a good start but platform lock and lack of collaboration layer killed it. Actually when speaking about UI tools I miss Macromedia Fireworks really badly. Imagine modern version with those principles..:)

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#27

Post by preommr »

deathtrader666 wrote: post #21
preommr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figma is an absolutely awful design tool that has great collaboration features. For a UI/UX design tool it has terrible constraints, and basically no support for state changes. There's variances now, which came out really recently. Before that, it was even worse. People would have separate designs for each possible state. Let alone how limited the possible actions are. It's just frames, boxes, and vector elements. An…

Would you say that Framer fares better than Figma?

I don't think Framer did as well as they were hoping.

The whole react component thing didn't turn out to be the killer feature collaboration was for figma. Framer has a lot of cool stuff, their plugin system is really powerful So you can have things like 3d elements which is super cool.

I am sure people use it, but it didn't grow in popularity like Figma did. I think with any kind of product, there's often a world of stuff happening under the surface that leads to success. I don't know why Framer hasn't been as successful. One guess would be that people just don't find writing react components and tying it to their design tool to be useful. Potentially too much friction, or that the people doing the designing don't often write react code. Or maybe they didn't market it well enough.

The question of components in design is really interesting but it's a whole other issue.

I do know that along with Adobe XD, Framer has had some issues with bugs. Figma, I would expect, is a lot more stable because they have their own custom renderer that's one canvas element whereas other tools use the DOM. It's one of the reasons why Figma is so feature-poor, they have implement a lot of behavior themselves.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#28

Post by dgb23 »

colmvp wrote: post #13
corytheboyd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine. I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer. Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here. Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all…

Some developers on HN have often said they enjoy when Designers know how to code, but it's actually quite hard to get a job as a designer who knows how to develop when you don't have the same coding experience as a pure developer. It's also hard to get a position where the development team trusts you to commit code. The only reason why I, with a design background, was able to learn frontend (as well as additional top…

As a designer who can code you get a job as a Designer who can code.

I've been mentoring a Designer and friend over the last year, and I'm also teaching coding for designers since a short while.

The benefits are quite tangible: As a programmer, you still structure the application, set up the tooling, build the abstractions and the logic, but you're now freed from fiddling with pixels, because the designer has already built his prototypes with implementation in mind, can communicate intent, compromises and solutions for edge cases, and they can also implement a lot of things by themselves, sometimes with guidance. Git is not rocket science either if you give them a clear workflow and resolve issues that are beyond what you'd expect.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#29

Post by AriaMinaei »

nbzso wrote: post #26

Design in a classical sense is dead. There is no real incentive for real deep design to happen. In a race with the clock, multiple points of view, collaboration design, standardization of ui by style libraries and UX design overhead, the soul of design as a process is lost. I am classically trained designer with more than 20 year practice, I have been in many roles, from PD trough Project Management, business owner,…

Thank you for writing this. FWIW, what you describe as “not design” has a parallel in programming; as in, most of what we do is not engineering.

Anyway, I’m working on a “design” tool. I’m reachable via my handle at gmail. Reach out if you’re interested. Would be nice to bounce ideas.

Re: Figma: The product design team’s process

#30

Post by 542458 »

nbzso wrote: post #26

Design in a classical sense is dead. There is no real incentive for real deep design to happen. In a race with the clock, multiple points of view, collaboration design, standardization of ui by style libraries and UX design overhead, the soul of design as a process is lost. I am classically trained designer with more than 20 year practice, I have been in many roles, from PD trough Project Management, business owner,…

I respectfully disagree with your central thesis - that the soul of design in UX has been lost. What is the soul of design? I would argue that it’s improving the human experience. Graphic design does this by creating beauty, industrial design by creating valued products, UX design does this by improving interfaces.

Reusing common elements across UIs is a good thing. People complain about the “standard” splash page layout, or the stereotypical web-app styling... but Jakob’s Law is real, and users don’t want to learn another damn UI paradigm, they want to use your product to solve their problems. Reuse simplifies learning and so is a massive positive from an end-user perspective, and making the user’s life better is the designers role.

As you’ve noted, Figma is not infinitely flexible. For graphic design this would be a drawback, as novelty is heavily rewarded. But for UX design? Novelty is less important, and correctly communicating how a design should be implemented is much more essential to a user’s experience. And if I need maximum flexibility I can always use another tool.

I’m not claiming everything is perfect in Figma or the industry - but I think the doom is overstated.

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