Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
Flutter
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.
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.
Flutter is well known for native app development, if you have android studio installed on your system, you can quickly start using it. This might not be the best choice for you if you do not wish to learn a new language, i.e. Dart and you do not know it already.
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.
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.
Occasionally updates to the Flutter SDK result in wide-sweeping changes that seem to not be thoroughly tested and considered. Flutter sometimes evolves too fast for its own good.
While the 3rd-party Flutter package ecosystem is vast and rich, 1st-party support for basic things (audio/video playback, battery information, Bluetooth services, etc.) are lacking. You are occasionally forced to rely on an open-source package for use-cases that other platforms have native support for.
Documentation, particularly around testing, is lacking. While there are some great docs, like the Dart Style Guide, many Flutter-focused support documents are lacking in quality and real-world usability.
Flutter allows you to architect an app however you want. While this is a great feature, it also adds complexity and leads to the current state of Flutter's state management, where there are 50+ options on how to organize your app, with very little official guidance or recommendations from the Flutter team. For a beginner, this can create decision paralysis.
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.
I have experience with react and React Native. I would say that the idea behind all those frameworks are quite similar. However, I found the javascript-based frameworks a bit more accessible as you could utilise your javascript knowledge. Here, Flutter works with its own language. This has advantages and disadvantages sometimes. I found the community around javascript frameworks bigger and therefore sometimes more helpful. However, Flutter does a good job here as well. I think the main argument for Flutter is its usability for less experienced developers. If you do not have knowledge in javascript or other programming languages then I think it is much easier to start with Flutter than with another framework like react. I think the package that you get form scratch is better than in the other frameworks were you have to set up and learn a lot more before you can start.
The rapid development capabilities of Flutter allow us to build apps we could not have previously considered commercially viable, opening new revenue streams.
Free and open licensing made adoption very easy (ie. free/low cost!).
In comparison to Qt, our time spent arguing with build tools and perfecting development environments has decreased substantially.
