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Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

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41–50 of 238 posts

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#42
I ran a design team, and many really struggled with Sketch -> Figma transition, and took a long time.

I welcome many of the new features. It's great for designers who are more technically oriented, though enterable input fields would be nice.

I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher.

I'm worried about the rather pricey per / seat cost. There are far more developers than engineers at most organizations, and this is really going to hurt the licensing cost. Definitely Adobe bean counters flexing its muscle.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#43

Really looking forward to this progressing to automatic React component generation and onto bidirectional sync; prompting automatic pull requests on Figma changes for affected components. I find that there are few tasks in software development more uninteresting than converting Figma designs into React components. The day I no longer have to do that will be a great day indeed :)

I'm going to have to look into this because while that sounds like an incredible future, I don't see it. we have thousands of custom classes and dozens of material themes, can Figma work with that and then generate a component using our core custom styles?...

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#44

I just want to be able to download the original, full quality, uncropped version of an image. And to have built-in options for compressing images. Also I hope dev mode prevents designers from locking/hiding elements and layers, which makes it very difficult to export the elements you actually need.

I realize you specified "built-in" but just in case you weren't aware, plugins exist to download ("Export Original Images") and compress ("Downsize") images in Figma, and both work well.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#45

Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?

Yup. This is far from new. Used to be getting a zip file full of low quality photoshop exports and you would have better luck pulling teeth out of a cranky tiger(1) than getting proper assets (or the raw files) out of the art team. My favorite was the PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t happen to me but I’ve heard about it. 1: Somewhat redundant. Any tiger you try to get teeth out is likely to be cranky before you finish…

I like the PPT - it is more like a wireframe!

Yes, similar to the photoshop days. I forgot all about those. Has been almost 10yr since I had that happen!

PPT doesn't bother me because it's very "what we need" not "how we need it" so I don't have to worry about the specifics and instead can focus on (and ask questions about) the intent of the feature.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#46
post #25

Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?

Unimaginative leadership that didn't trust their teams. Prototyping the 'experience' (mostly happy path) in a design tool, gave them 'visibility' into what the product could become.

I don't think it's a trust thing, but yes - I think leadership not knowing what they want is a big part of it.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#47
post #40

Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?

What's worse is treating engineers like "just implement the mockup eyeroll " but then the logic of the mockup makes no sense with real data or product. I'd rather have a napkin sketch that we can work on together vs throwing pictures over the wall. As impressive as it is, I feel like Figma makes this situation worse. It's like "see we've figured it all out devs, look how nice this looks. No discussion needed"

I feel like that might be an organizational problem. At my company the designers will present their figma designs to engineering and we'll have a meeting to go through them and bring up concerns with exactly those sorts of issues e.g. "This list may actually have hundreds of entries in practice, are bullet points still right?". Then we iterate.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#48
post #40

Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?

What's worse is treating engineers like "just implement the mockup eyeroll " but then the logic of the mockup makes no sense with real data or product. I'd rather have a napkin sketch that we can work on together vs throwing pictures over the wall. As impressive as it is, I feel like Figma makes this situation worse. It's like "see we've figured it all out devs, look how nice this looks. No discussion needed"

I agree with these points. Someone mentioned the PPT method - and I like it for your reasons! It's like a wireframe.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse is treating engineers like "just implement the mockup eyeroll " but then the logic of the mockup makes no sense with real data or product. I'd rather have a napkin sketch that we can work on together vs throwing pictures over the wall. As impressive as it is, I feel like Figma makes this situation worse. It's like "see we've figured it all out devs, look how nice this looks. No discussion needed"

I feel like that might be an organizational problem. At my company the designers will present their figma designs to engineering and we'll have a meeting to go through them and bring up concerns with exactly those sorts of issues e.g. "This list may actually have hundreds of entries in practice, are bullet points still right?". Then we iterate.

Wait, your product people talk to devs?

/s (at my previous company they did not ... lol!)

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#50
post #40

Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?

What's worse is treating engineers like "just implement the mockup eyeroll " but then the logic of the mockup makes no sense with real data or product. I'd rather have a napkin sketch that we can work on together vs throwing pictures over the wall. As impressive as it is, I feel like Figma makes this situation worse. It's like "see we've figured it all out devs, look how nice this looks. No discussion needed"

they always use text that is ideally sized in mock-ups but completely falls over when real data is used in a responsive web app.

My favorite is when design adds data to a mock-up that we don't actually have. My company is, admittedly, a bit of a joke.

Also up there: design giving us mock-ups that are a composite of shit that needs done today and future shit they still haven't decided on. And then demand review approvals. No. You can't have it both ways you fucking morons. Either give me exactly what needs to be done, or you get no review rights. I'm not going to sit here for three weeks of back-and-forth while you play hunt-the-pixel and giving me hell for not matching the fog in your own head.

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