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Figma: The product design team’s process
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#32I'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…
Exhausting but satisfying. Design and engineering have overlapping process and goals. Performance, problem solving, structure, creativity, experimentation... Unfortunately I've seen many who want to be both but are a master of none.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#33For 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…
As a developer, I found Figma to be amazing, but that may be due to the designer I worked with.
At a previous job, I would just get PNGs or PDFs of some design, and I had to try to implement it. Often ended up with inflexible, hard-coded shit, guessing sizes ("8px padding? I think so??"), guessing colors, whatever.
At another job, the designer I worked with just gave me a link to a Figma file, and I had everything I needed. I could shit out front-end stuff quickly, without any issues.
I used to think I was just a bad at front-end, and therefore preferred the back-end. Turns out I'm just not that good a designer, and with a tool like Figma, building the actual designer's vision was easy and joyful.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#34Design 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 la…
Yes, this is emotional topic for me. If I run sentiment analysis on my reaction the answer will be clear.
What I mean by the soul of design?
This will be long and please skip my point of view if you find it offensive in any way. This is not my goal.
In my view, created from practice in multiple roles there is clearly several types of problems.
1. Cultural Problem - Design is complex field, it requires clear distinction from art, because in the core of design process is functional need of solving real problems with added aesthetics and emotional identification/impact (respectfully to given scope, audience and case). There is no simple way to explain design profession, but in peoples minds programming is magic - design is decoration. Actually to be a good designer you have to learn marketing, psychology and business processes, if you have to solve problems you must have knowledge of all the problems. Then comes implementation and you have army of technical people who are looking on you like a child, because they think they are smarter,:) Which is a joke in 80% of the time, and actually is my emotional motivation to become one - to check how smart are they actually. With time I have seen the true - only 20% (generalisation, not actual data) of any given field are true professionals with actual drive, they are moving with them all the rest of the heard.
2. Money Problem - Designers are cheap, because they have been undervalued for years. And this is not new, before Internet boom, advertising agencies made all they possibly can designers to be second grade citizens. How? By creating public perception that design is only aesthetics and everyone can be a designer. This objectively is a lie. Everyone can be an artist, to be a designer you must have scientific mind and use data to make decision in every step of the process and then have aesthetic knowledge and broad culture to create emotional impact. I solved this problem first by creating my own Advertising Agency and when Internet come along I transformed the company to Agency for User Oriented Design and Web - based solutions. Working and solving actual business problems with real customer data I now have a clear picture what is business value of design decisions. Professional design is capable of direct Return of investment, actually in today's world of frameworks and compartmentalisation of programming and cloud services, design is directly the tool that can make a difference and generate revenue. Programming is cheaper in production than successful design.
3. Investors Problem. Investors are given the power to decide who is "the rock-star". They give tons of money to technical founders with an idea. No business experience, no proven record. You have to be programmer with idea and some form of prototype. I have seen this first hand.
Can you see where I am going with this? Example: Recently I have been approached by startup making another service over successful API with React on top. They have build horrible product UX with bad copy on top of generic landing page. I can turn this product in profitable business by UX/UI redesign and proper CX. And what is in this for me? A "competitive salary"? Are you serious? NO. No more design for pennies. Period. Yes, you can hire me to beautify your shit and implement front-end functionality but real design solutions are for my business ventures only. Actually like everyone else I am selling my time and expertise and just like everyone else I am searching "the easiest way to make money".
I will repeat my self: Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 la…
Yes, this is emotional topic for me. If I run sentiment analysis on my reaction the answer will be clear. What I mean by the soul of design? This will be long and please skip my point of view if you find it offensive in any way. This is not my goal. In my view, created from practice in multiple roles there is clearly several types of problems. 1. Cultural Problem - Design is complex field, it requires clear distincti…
> Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service.
I am curious about this point you’ve made. Can you help me understand this better?
I am someone who has switched from Sketch to Figma and I believe Figma is far superior for my use cases in nearly every way. Also, I believe that Figma’s free tier is excellent for casual users or those without a license from their company (between jobs). For me, Figma has been a breath of fresh air and the recent auto layout improvements have taken it to the next level. I work full time as a product designer.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#36For 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…
What’s a great design tool in your opinion? (UI/UX and ignoring collaboration features)
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is emotional topic for me. If I run sentiment analysis on my reaction the answer will be clear. What I mean by the soul of design? This will be long and please skip my point of view if you find it offensive in any way. This is not my goal. In my view, created from practice in multiple roles there is clearly several types of problems. 1. Cultural Problem - Design is complex field, it requires clear distincti…
> Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service. I am curious about this point…
I am biased in my view. But if you have spare time you can check what was Macromedia Fireworks approach to UI design process.
I somewhat agree with preommr on this:
"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."
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service. I am curious about this point…
I am biased in my view. But if you have spare time you can check what was Macromedia Fireworks approach to UI design process. I somewhat agree with preommr on this: "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 ev…
Fireworks was basically sketch + a slice of Photoshop but years before Sketch was even relevant.
Absolutely mind boggling how Adobe didn’t see value in it at the time.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am biased in my view. But if you have spare time you can check what was Macromedia Fireworks approach to UI design process. I somewhat agree with preommr on this: "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 ev…
Fireworks was basically sketch + a slice of Photoshop but years before Sketch was even relevant. Absolutely mind boggling how Adobe didn’t see value in it at the time.
“Absolutely mind boggling how Adobe ___________”
Lots of ways to fill in that particular blank. Lots of squandered opportunities and questionable choices over there.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service. I am curious about this point…
I am biased in my view. But if you have spare time you can check what was Macromedia Fireworks approach to UI design process. I somewhat agree with preommr on this: "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 ev…
> basically no support for state changes
I agree that this is a major problem. User interfaces are full of state changes and Figma requires a new artboard for every state. While this is an issue, I’m not aware of any software that has solved this. Do you know of any?