My Figma wish list: 10 features to build in 2020

Last year my team made the decision to try switching our complex Sketch + Abstract + Invision flow for Figma. Working in a team with multiple designers, product managers, developers, copywriters, and more stakeholders than I can remember, Figma keeps us all working in sync. The collaborative design tool is getting praise for all the right reasons and while it does many things very well, I’ve rounded up my top 10 features I’d love to see them roll out.

1. Incognito mode

Please let me hide my cursor from others, I’m shy. While it’s possible to hide other users’ cursors, sometimes I really don’t want mine to be shown or show that I’m online.

2. Improve text-box behaviour

I’m pretty disappointed Figma text-boxes don’t work the same way as Sketch, it’s not a dealbreaker but it is frustrating. When adjusting text alignment, Figma doesn’t retain where the origin anchor was set (where you clicked) and instead always keeps the origin as the visual top-left, making the text-alignment property pretty useless (adjusting these does absolutely nothing to inline text). In the above gif, you can see how Sketch moves the text-box origin so the text-alignment (left/right/centre) of the text box is anchored to where the text-box was initially placed. This is a behaviour crafted around designer intent rather than purist engineering. It’s also particularly useful if you are creating a new text-box and have the wrong alignment set as default as it sets your brand new box in the right place. — please fix it!

I also have an intermittent bug that when the font size is larger than a text-box created with a single click, Figma instantly de-selects it. It’s hard to replicate it exactly, but I often find empty text-boxes littered around my document with nothing in them.

3. HTML embeds

Prototyping in Figma is pretty basic, but for what most teams use it for it does the job. Some of the more nuanced interactions though are difficult to replicate, such as onboarding videos or maps. I’d love to see HTML embeds in…