Why you should be running your design team entirely on Notion + Whimsical + Figma
It’s time to leave the world of a dozen single-purpose apps behind.
Say goodbye to the giant set of tools that trail in your team’s wake and lay there forgotten, silently draining your budget and accumulating cruft.
Say goodbye to Google Docs, Sheets, Airtable, Trello, JIRA, Confluence, Balsamiq, Draw.io, Mural, Abstract, Sketch, Zeplin, Invision, Principle, and whatever else has been bogging down your workflow.
You only need three tools for your design team
With Notion, you can bring everything from documentation, interview notes, product ideas, research insights, inspiration galleries, project trackers, hiring pipeline, and much more all into one place. This is your team’s collective consciousness.
A great way to learn more about what you can do with Notion is to check out their templates gallery.
On Whimsical, you can create mind maps, sticky notes, user flows, and wireframes. This is where your team’s rough ideas live.
With Figma, you can have your design system, version history, UI design, comments, handoff, and prototypes complete with transitions and animation. This is your all-in-one design tool.
You’ll still need Slack, Zoom, or whatever else your company uses as a whole, but the design team itself can operate everything on this toolset.
All three are real-time multiplayer web-based tools
If you’re a remote or distributed team, you can’t afford to not work this way. Any team in 2020 can’t afford not to work this way.
Web-based means you can work on any device. Laptop falls out of your hand and somehow goes down a storm drain right before a deadline? No problem, just sign in on any computer (Mac or PC) and all your work is there.
In a real-time multiplayer tool, you can always see what everyone is doing (bit creepy, but also super cool). You can follow along while someone else works. You can also sketch together or have digital whiteboarding sessions.
Or… you can take a mid-design break and play Tic-Tac-Toe.
The wonderful world of one tool for each purpose
- No more exporting, syncing, or redoing work
- Less time keeping track of what’s where
- You can get all three for $30/designer/month. That’s $360/year. Not a bad budget for EVERYTHING.
It really is that simple. Notion for all your documentation and project management. Whimsical for diagramming and sketching ideas. Figma for hi-fi design and prototyping.
Would you be interested in learning more about these tools? Leave a comment about which one you’d be interested in diving into more and I’ll write a separate post about it!
