Figma has been a game-changer for my team. It’s perfect for collaboration, rapid prototyping, and development handoff. In addition, FigJam allows for collaborative workshops remotely. As I mentioned, we use Figma daily to design experiences, create clickable prototypes to share and perform user testing, run brainstorming workshops with FigJam, and manage our Design System. Figma solves so many business problems, including the ability to collaboratively create experiences across the UX and product teams and provide tokens for our developers. Like most design teams, we need to be able to test our work with users. Figma allows for rapid prototyping that we can share with the world to get real-time user feedback through our user testing tool. In addition, we have set up our design system in Figma. It has allowed for easy collaboration and communication with designers across the company and seamless execution for our developers using tokenization.
Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short — but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
As a visual designer, I spend 90% of my working time in Figma. So, as a design tool, Figma is mature and feature-rich. It covers all the basic needs and provides extras, such as simple prototyping and the ability to use external plugins.
Collaboration: It’s very easy to work together on the same file in Figma. You can easily brainstorm together or use Figma as a shared screen.
Smartness of components: Figma provides many adaptability options for components that allow building very flexible and scalable layouts.
OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points.
OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories.
What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be.
Sometimes, I have to break components - if there was an easier way to customize on the spot without breaking them.
If I change the naming convention in the library, it would be nice to replace the old version. Because it will just remove the style altogether, I have to go back and apply it again.
I'd love to be able to keep more than one of the different tool tabs open at a time.
The stencils are amazing. Would be great if a whole lot more of the free ones came standard as opposed to having to download them from Graffletopia or other sites.
I rated 10 because there are many reasons to retain Figma as a design tool. 1. Very high dependency on designers, as it is one of the go-to design tools. 2. Figma has the majority of the product designs, either moved to development or in progress. 3. This is one of the best design tools which provides lots of flexibility and analytics related to the usage of components which is a great feature. Overall its one of the best design tools we have, hence retaining it would be an ideal choice.
It's so simple to use! I have no background in UI design but basic designing and I was able to learn this software Figma within 3-5 days. There are tons of tutorials available on Youtube from so many popular YouTubers in the space, you can just go through them and start designing.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
It's been at least a couple years since I used Sketch. It used to be my go to, but then there was a sudden shift towards Figma, and Sketch become obsolete. I was initially less drawn to Figma as it introduced a learning curve I wasn't ready to add to my workflow. I remember the days when I was onboarding designers from Sketch to Figma and that transition was hard as we were used to certain ways of working. Now, I believe Figma is easier to start with if there's nothing else to compare it with.
While these other tools are great for what they are, OmniGraffle’s solid focus on and support for diagramming makes it our tool of choice for communicating workflows and concept relationships, creating documentation, and creating other diagrams. Its libraries allow us to create designs quickly, and its ease of use enables us to use the tool widely across the company without much time or effort spent on onboarding.
Omnigraffle isn't an expensive software tool, so there isn't really any negative from the perspective of raw cost. Thinking in terms of time spent using it on a project - what you create in omnigraffle will inevitably lead to a dead end. It's useful only as documentation. There are other tools like Sketch that integrate into prototyping software and can create useable visual assets for applications in addition to being able to create wireframes.
