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Why Figma Wins

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Re: Why Figma Wins

#151

Post by josefrichter »

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…

InVision doesn't have any design features. It's just a prototyping tool, you need to import designs from somewhere.

Figma is a bit like Sketch+InVision combined. With the InVision part actually better than InVision.

There is also InVision Studio, which was their attempt on full-fledged prototyping tool, but it's largely abandoned now, always suffered with huge reliability and perfomance issues and never became truly usable tool. It's a pity, it looked very promising.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#152

Post by josefrichter »

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.

I like being able to combine drawing+prototyping in one place, with an easy way of sharing. Syncing from Sketch to InVision is still not great and prototyping in InVision is actually very limited and not exactly a pleasure to use either.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#153

Post by josefrichter »

vvpan wrote: post #92

I do not work on a Mac or want to. So anything that praises Figma over Sketch I upvote. You might think that it's a shallow position but when a company decides to limit their product to only one platform there is a price they have to pay.

That's because 99% of good designers are on Mac. That has never been a serious problem.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#154

Post by dorkwood »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #139
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…

Agreed. And I think there's a certain personality of people who are employed in UX that lean more towards the design than the conceptual side that often get lost in the weeds with this stuff, too, and you'll end up with a series of mocks that look great, smell great, and gosh darn it people like them... but are missing all error screens, corner cases, more complicated states, and leave developers in the dark on the b…

I think the reality is that most people who originally got into design did so not because they were passionate about user experience, but because they had some artistic sensibility, and design was a field that would let them utilise that sensitivity for aesthetics while also paying them a salary.

Over the past five years or so, the landscape has changed considerably, and many designers have been forced to make a decision to either head down a more UX-oriented path or do something else entirely. The result of this is that we now have a lot of UX designers who never really wanted to do UX, but were forced to adapt and take on a new role due to a changing industry.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#155

Post by mekster »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #62
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much. Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?

sketch file is an open format[0]. figma will lock you in. there is no export project feature in figma https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038006274-Files-... that is why it is so easy to migrate into figma from sketch, and impossible to migrate away from figma into anything else... [0] https://github.com/sketch-hq/sketch-file-format

I hate to see another vendor lock in by file format like PSD to keep competitors out.

It better be fixed before they become big enough not to care.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#156

Post by wx196 »

httpsterio wrote: post #117
uxcolumbo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible solution to that problem: Have a plugin which could turn the unfinished modal for example into a wireframe look & feel and then when you have the right icon, turn it off again. I remember back in the days Expression Blend had some functionality to apply sketchy lines style (based on Bill Buxton's book - Sketching User Experiences). Also, the prototyping functionality is still rather basic. Axure is much more…

What does RP exactly do that you can't do in Figma? With the right plugins and component libraries, I dare say that Figma is definitely more powerful than Axure's offering.

I tried to switch to Adobe XD, but sooner or later you can't do some sort of thing that is simple in Axure and you are stuck. Simple example. You have a settings page like this:

Setting 1 name [toggle]

Setting 2 name [toggle]

Setting 3 name [toggle]

You want to turn any toggle on and panel with subsettings should appear underneath clicked setting name, shifting down all other settings below. In Axure it is just a checkmark "push widgets below".

Re: Why Figma Wins

#157

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

I have experienced this same situation in Zeplin and Invision, so I suppose this is not just Figma.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#158

Post by [deleted] »

markdown wrote: post #85
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.

> Engineers are talking to designers. We really do love to pump ourselves up, don't we? My grandpa was an engineer who built bridges. I wouldn't dare call myself an "engineer" for slicing up a design, authoring markup and CSS, and sprinkling in a JS plugin or two.

[deleted]

Re: Why Figma Wins

#159

Post by raindropm »

greyswan wrote: post #39
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…

My uncle had a successful career in advertising. He would always say to me, "don't be just a wrist." He meant participate in guiding the concept and strategy instead of just being an execution person. I've been in the design industry for 15 years now. When I was starting out, there was a flurry of philosophizing about design. There was a belief that designers should focus on solving problems instead of just making sl…

Good execution compliment good strategy. I think you can also be the valuable wrist that hard to replace.

I've seen people who knows about the theory and have creative idea, but the end result they made is just...lacking?, because they focus just about the strategy part and kinda look down on the importance of good execution. They may know that it is not good, not what they envisioned, but they don't know how to make it better because they don't know how the production process works, and usually have to accept what the vendor gives you.

But well yeah, there are certainly people that just want to be a wrist and not thinking too much about anything.

Re: Why Figma Wins

#160

Post by wx196 »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #107
cateye wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like https://www.axure.com/ which was quite popular 10 years ago.

Axure beats Figma when it comes to wireframing and prototyping. Building enterprise apps means dealing with a lot of forms and grids and making these fully interactive is easier in Axure.

I think many people don't get why Axure is still popular is because they don't design for enterprise software. Sometimes it is just much easier to create table as a table and not as a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines like you will have to do in most of design software.
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