Figma - Worth the Hype- Absolutely

From Clouded Judgement by Jamin Ball — read the original.

Notes

• A couple weeks ago Okta released their annual Business at Work report - a great review on how businesses got work done in 2020.
• In today’s world, every company is becoming a software company, and elegant UIs and customer experiences are table stakes. As we’ve seen the rate of software development skyrocket, so too has the need for designers. If your product isn’t easy to use, visually appealing or intuitive it will be crushed by competition.
• As is generally the case, a cloud version of a previously non-cloud product often times greatly expands the market. #TAM
• Before getting into what makes Figma so special, it’s important to understand how the world worked before Figma was around. #Status Quo
• There are so many details that sit behind the design that the engineer needs context on. To address this, the designer will either markup the design with these details, or they’ll sit down with the engineer to discuss (or there will be hundreds of back and forth slack messages). It’s a pain.
• In summary, prior to Figma the challenges of designers workflow included: a lack of collaborative features with desktop apps, version control difficulties, design-to-developer context challenges, prototyping that lived in yet another tool, and a plethora of plugins that were impossible to manage.
• Vector editors / designers are very similar to excel / bankers. Designers become extremely fluent in both the shortcuts and functionalities that exist in a tool like Sketch, and it’s really hard to get them to change. For a new entrant like Figma to have a chance they not only have to get on par with the functionality (this should not be understated, the vector editors are incredibly powerful), but they also have to represent all of this functionality in a browser (VERY difficult). This is why it took Figma years to get customer traction. But when they did, the floodgates opened. Product-Market Fit
• It really took a previous workflow that was Sketch + many plugins and made it: Figma. The seamless experience of having everything you need in one tool cannot be understated. All-in-One vs. Best-in-Class