Dylan Field’s Post

!!!!!

Figma is evolving into a tool with an overly complex feature set, mirroring the issue Adobe faced. Its strength lies in bridging the gap between design and development, a key aspect of its value proposition. This unique capability is precisely why I transitioned from Adobe and Sketch to Figma. It's crucial for Figma to maintain focus on this core aspect that originally attracted its user base.

In my experience, the biggest headache with Figma these days is how slow it's gotten. It's packed with features, which is great, but just trying to quickly check something out or look at a link someone sent over can be painfully slow. If I've left a bunch of tabs open the last time I used it, I know I'm in for a rough time when I open it up again. I wish it could just be snappy and handle big projects better. Once everything's up and running, it's all good. But now, every time I see a Figma link in Slack, I kind of pause and brace myself for that annoying wait time before I can even get a quick look or shoot back a reply.

Not sure y’all spent enough time getting devs hooked on these features before charging $$$. Most of our devs have no idea what dev mode is or its benefits.

I am really excited to see your take on annotations - I ask designers for these all the time and usually it comes in the form of a sticky note in the file.

Awesome ! But should we have to switch to the dev mode as a designer to add annotations ? If it’s the case, it will be hard a as a designer to adopt this awesome feature because too hidden. And we’ll have to think to check and maybe update each time we edit the screens

Dylan, Figma has a huge impact on the kinds of designs that get created. Because of the ease of use and figma being the default tool for so many, designers find it valuable to work within what Figma offers. This is great, but this is also restrictive. Supporting more complex ideas/explorations get naturally limited. It's great that Figma is expanding the dev mode. I hope the team also goes much deeper an find ways to enable more complex interactions. The introduction of variables helps in this regard. It needs to be simpler to use for wider adoption and usage. + More such logic based interactions and more flexibility in micro-animations is needed. How can figma enable more innovative interaction design?

These features are real neat and I can see its immediate value for teams that will use it but what doesn't make sense is DevMode being freely available to designers (via design seats) but for any engineers/devs to see it on their end, they'll require a paid seat. There's aspects to it that make sense but what doesn't make sense is the wasted feature set for designers that don't/won't be able to collaborate with engineers through this. Feels like there could be a middle ground with limited functionality for a higher design seat price that would be able to "share" DevMode with engineers... could just have this turned off for regular design seats since the real value gets lost otherwise 🤷♂️

PM mode next where all cross-functional alignment happens automatically ;)

So we’re back to the same solution we had for annotations when we were using Sketch and Photoshop? Figma should be an innovative enough platform to render old and laborious tasks redundant via innovation. This tool will still add time to someone’s backlog. Rather than defaulting to an old a solution years after launch, couldn’t Figma have seamlessly integrated annotations into the workflow as was originally envisioned?