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Five areas Figma need to improve on to stay a step ahead
It’s 2022. Figma has completely taken over the Product Design world over the last four years. It’s rare to see a company gain such rapid adoption across an entire industry so quickly.
With that kind of growth comes a lot of problems. The product accrues debt in different areas (both technical and UX) as a team tries to scale fast. Business and user pressures lead to certain areas of the product being prioritized and others falling below the line of what you have the capacity to focus on. A lot of aspects of a product also become a lot harder to fix at scale. These are all realities of product development that everyone should try to understand. I know this well from experience.
I don’t assume any solutions I suggest here are the right ones, and certainly not as easy or quick as an article like this may imply. This is simply an exercise in reflecting more deeply on my experiences with a product that I love and use daily and trying to identify the biggest pain points. The aim is to have a little bit of shared Figma community catharsis, but also to spark ideas within the Figma team or the community at large (hooray for plugins).
Disclaimer: I am friendly with many people on Figma’s team, have participated in a lot of user research sessions for them, and have guested on a Figma live stream. These suggestions come from a good place with the confidence that Figma‘s product team can and will continue to nail it.
Right. Let’s do this.
1. Design tokens
Design tokens are a simple concept with incredibly powerful capabilities if used effectively. If you’re unfamiliar with Design tokens, they are variables with unique names that are assigned simple values, and can be used in place of static values for colors, pixel values for spacing/sizing, fonts, etc. They are very similar to styles in Figma, but more granular and more powerful.
Currently, the only workable solution I’ve found to using design tokens in Figma is to use a 3rd party plugin such as Figma Tokens, Design Tokens or Themer. We use Themer at Onfido, but…
