Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
OpenText Vibe
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText Vibe (formerly Micro Focus Vibe) is a web-based team collaboration platform developed by Novell, and was initially released by Novell in June 2008 under the name of Novell Teaming. Novell's acquisition by Micro Focus was completed in April 2015.
I would recommend if you need to start from scratch a product UI or any customer journey that you need to implement that requires designing and visualizing different steps to complete a process. I would recommend that any design/UI/UX team brainstorm and make proposals that they can compare and discuss in a visual way.
I think Micro Focus Vibe is very well suited for organizations that work in a team collaboration front and have to share documents. I think this really shines in organizations that have a standard set of information that gets lost in the sauce because of the sheer amount of people in an organization. In this case, the Wiki is very helpful in this setting. I wouldn't quite recommend this site for video production houses unless you are patient enough to correlate your needs to the many many features available through Vibe...because it all boils down to patience.
Figma allows us to create universal content. This means that if multiple designers want to re-use a piece of content, and if everyone's content should be dynamically updated from time to time, we can easily accomplish this by turning design elements into a universal instance. Then, if an update is needed, we can push the change out to all assets at once. It's very efficient and ensures we're all updating content accordingly.
Figma also allows us to set parameters for the company's brand guide and share them across various designers. This way, we can easily pull from approved brand fonts, colors, and more, which allows our assets to remain unified across multiple touchpoints.
Figma also allowed us to create and install our own plugin, which we use to export every slide we have in a frame at one time, versus the default export feature, which limits you to one slice at a time. This is particularly useful for us when we're working on email templates, since we tend to have a ton of slices in any given series.
Novell Vibe connects GroupWise mail with Vibe natively which means you can access Vibe from within the mail product.
Once forms and workflows are set up, the access structure on who sees what or not is very effective.
You can use Novell Vibe as your main intranet with everything from wiki's, blogging and more fully automated and still in synch with your internal organisational structure.
After playing with it for a while i found that through jsp it is highly configurable.
It will be great if Figma will consider having the Pages where interactions can be stitched together among the Pages and not just one page with so many Frames to create the stand-alone clickable prototype that can be used to simulate the intended UX
Bring back the Inspect Mode tab right on the right-side panel of the main workspace instead of hiding behind the Dev Mode.
Figma Slides feature could be improved quite a bit more in order to be easier to assemble slides into a presentation deck and having pre-built templates for slides can be useful too.
The most pressing improvement is in printing. In speaking with Novell techs Vibe was designed as a web tool, no paper necessary. However in the real world our folks love their paper printouts. Vibe utilizes views for various functions. A print view that's easily configured would be an awesome upgrade.
Customized in JSP. Vibe is completely customized using JSP. I don't know it. I'm not a programmer. I can work things out, but programming isn't my forte.
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
It meets our current business needs and provides the scalability we need for future growth. It can be installed on Windows or Linux (Our alpha install was on Linux. Our beta was on Windows. We went with Windows). There are additional features, and application integrations, that we haven't taken advantage as of yet due to the lack of current business needs.
There's a bit of a learning curve, but generally I think it's both more powerful and intuitive that other UX design tools. Most of what I need to do as a designer can be done in this platform, from basic wireframes to creating a design system, to creating pixel perfect designs, to prototyping to dev handoff.
At this moment it still looks you need to do a lot to be able to use it and to be honest that time should be used for work not for configuring a communication tool for the business. Yes I understand that it takes time to learn something to use in the organisation , but with this tool I see the help desk having to answer a lot of questions on how to use it or once someone has done something how to undo it.
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.
Miro is more user-friendly than Figma, but is less robust in terms of web prototyping and graphic design. While Figma isn't made to be used as a design tool, our team has taken to using it as such because it's richer in functions and personalizations compared to Miro and Figma.
The main alternatives were Sharepoint or creating a custom Drupal install. Sharepoint was too expensive and didn't fit into our Novell environment. The Drupal solution we found was beyond our technical ability.
