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Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

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Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#151

Post by drewbeck »

bgribble wrote: post #103

As a developer, the "one big bulletin board" visual model that Figma promotes is one of the worst steps backwards in UX I have ever had to deal with. I am constantly zooming in and out and scrolling around trying to find anything. I hate it so much.

I can for sure see how the 'big board' approach isn't good (and it looks like they're attending to this to some degree with the new Dev Mode features). I'm curious what handoff experience you had before that was better. Prior to Figma (as a designer) my workflows were always "send a PDF with designs, export some assets", which I imagine was non-standard, and not great, so I'm wondering what was improved for you before?

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#152

Post by Hermitian909 »

dahwolf wrote: post #123
pcurve wrote: post #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…

I know quite a lot of non-technical designers and many aren't too happy about what one might call design engineering. Design systems, tokens, modules, over the top consistency/reuse, the programmatic approach to design is experienced by some as a major buzzkill.

As an engineer at a large company whose moonlighted as a designer it's felt like a huge win.

It's now way easier to both stop designers from adding one-off design and interaction patterns that confuse users and to write truly reusable components that allow us to iterate faster as a company while maintaining a high level of visual consistency and polish. That's a big challenge once you start hitting org sizes in the hundreds or thousands.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#153

Post by supertofu »

tharkun__ wrote: post #143
Akronymus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use figma quite extensively as a reference for our current project. The disgners constantly move stuff around, so the links to them, in tasks, break and point to nothing. Which is a major pain in the ass indeed. So yeah, 100% agree that the "big bulletin approach" is a negative.

I've completely reneged on linking to figma in individual tasks. I take screenshots of the state of figma at the time we all agreed that "this is it" (or close enough to what we'll implement). Sure I'll leave a link in the epic to the figma "bulletin board" for that feature so that people can find it and look around. But that's it. We're also never gonna implement exactly what's shown in figma (or said screenshots) e…

And I thought it was just my design colleagues who did this :/

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#154

Post by grishka »

codethief wrote: post #142
grishka wrote: post #113

For me, as an Android developer, this is a huge improvement. Finally, I can easily select elements that were non-selectable-without-holding-cmd in the "design" mode. The thing that shows paddings and margins is a godsend, AND it stays put when you move your mouse somewhere else and switch to another window. The size tooltip also now shows the actual helpful size in pixels in addition to the unhelpful "hug/fill". The…

Interesting, I'm not an Android developer myself but at least our Android teams seem to really really like Compose. In fact yesterday I overheard one of the guys say, "Almost everyone in the industry is switching to Compose these days". (Not sure that's true but still.)

I'm personally on the opposite end of this spectrum. My projects don't use neither Kotlin nor even AppCompat. The AndroidX libraries that I need (because Google can't be assed to ship them as part of the system) like RecyclerView I use as my own fork that doesn't depend on anything else. I wholeheartedly despise what Google does to the Android development ecosystem. Google is not a good steward of Android.

Other developers I know approach Compose with caution and mostly use it for experiments, not in their real apps.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#155

Post by NTARelix »

Akronymus wrote: post #125
bgribble wrote: post #103

As a developer, the "one big bulletin board" visual model that Figma promotes is one of the worst steps backwards in UX I have ever had to deal with. I am constantly zooming in and out and scrolling around trying to find anything. I hate it so much.

We use figma quite extensively as a reference for our current project. The disgners constantly move stuff around, so the links to them, in tasks, break and point to nothing. Which is a major pain in the ass indeed. So yeah, 100% agree that the "big bulletin approach" is a negative.

My designers take their own snapshot by cloning their work and using versions in the names of things. Older things are not to be modified with few exceptions. It makes for a good linking experience on my end, but I don't know what that kind of maintenance is like for them.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#156

Post by whywhywhywhy »

pcurve wrote: post #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…

Would have won more advocates with free dev mode than charging half price for someone who can’t edit files to get data from the files.

Beginning of the end, and I say that as a previously huge Figma advocate.

Laying low on the cost charts would benefit you more than rinsing us and getting questioned “do we need that?”

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#157

Post by dahwolf »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #152
dahwolf wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know quite a lot of non-technical designers and many aren't too happy about what one might call design engineering. Design systems, tokens, modules, over the top consistency/reuse, the programmatic approach to design is experienced by some as a major buzzkill.

As an engineer at a large company whose moonlighted as a designer it's felt like a huge win. It's now way easier to both stop designers from adding one-off design and interaction patterns that confuse users and to write truly reusable components that allow us to iterate faster as a company while maintaining a high level of visual consistency and polish. That's a big challenge once you start hitting org sizes in the h…

No need to convince me of that, I'm an engineer.

But I still empathize with those designers. It's mechanized design which to some feel like a prison for their creativity. Even more so when all designs start to look the same across companies, and then there's AI design still to come.

What you emphasize, speed/productivity, is indeed the credo of our world, but that doesn't necessarily align with the goal of design. Take Apple, they don't seem to care about speed or continuous delivery at all, yet are widely celebrated for design excellence.

Likewise, "consistency" does not mean you found the optimal design. Even Google admitted that Material Design was a poor choice for some of their (internal) products and couldn't make it fit.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#158

Post by whywhywhywhy »

pcurve wrote: post #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…

Product designers all learn CAD, some learn DFM. Time to step up and understand the medium your work is implemented in.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#159

Post by polymath21 »

revskill wrote: post #115
bgribble wrote: post #103

As a developer, the "one big bulletin board" visual model that Figma promotes is one of the worst steps backwards in UX I have ever had to deal with. I am constantly zooming in and out and scrolling around trying to find anything. I hate it so much.

As a MacOS user, zooming on a touchpad is painful.

Hold CMD + two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in+out

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#160

Post by fidotron »

grishka wrote: post #154
codethief wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I'm not an Android developer myself but at least our Android teams seem to really really like Compose. In fact yesterday I overheard one of the guys say, "Almost everyone in the industry is switching to Compose these days". (Not sure that's true but still.)

I'm personally on the opposite end of this spectrum. My projects don't use neither Kotlin nor even AppCompat. The AndroidX libraries that I need (because Google can't be assed to ship them as part of the system) like RecyclerView I use as my own fork that doesn't depend on anything else. I wholeheartedly despise what Google does to the Android development ecosystem. Google is not a good steward of Android. Other deve…

I'm commenting here to agree, and because what you say is so specifically similar to my outbursts a good number of my colleagues would mistakenly believe I am you from this comment, and they regularly accuse me of being the only one!

It would be incredibly hard to do a worse job of shepherding the Android platform than Google have managed to do. It's no surprise iOS is growing.

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