Powerhouse of design with collaboration in mind
August 08, 2019

Powerhouse of design with collaboration in mind

Gwen Pierre | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Figma

Figma was implemented by our company so that our design team could collaborate with developers and the product team. The cloud based sharing platform was key to our decision to purchase this software. Originally, the product team did some light design work, which was simple since our design team setup shared elements. We no longer do design work here ourselves, but ourselves and developers use Figma to review and comment on work.

Pros

  • Figma is great for using a shared library of elements, creating iterations of projects, and global updates of icons and elements.
  • Sharing and commenting on work is easy and makes conversations about work easy to do in your own time.
  • Keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and it is easy to get the hang of quickly snapping objects and creating flows to wire up the prototype.

Cons

  • The iterations feature has some bugginess where you sometimes lose the wire-up flow in the new iteration and then have to go back and connect all the screens again.
  • I wish I could wire up triggers so that it is easier to show dropdown clicks and other user actions that then take the user to the next screen. Other programs I have used have some out of the box elements that act as drop-downs, etc to make this easier.
  • Figma is really meant for a team with a designer who creates and manages the library of elements. If you are looking for an out of the box solution, this is not for you.
  • Better collaboration across teams: online comments mean fewer phone calls to disrupt the workday.
  • Reduced confusion: realtime updates during Sprint make sure the team always knows what the work should look like when completed.
  • Early customer feedback: wired prototypes allows very early alpha testing before we've actually built anything.
There's precision and constant vigilance required to make sure components stay clean so work is updated across projects accurately. Because it's so easy for collaborators to alter components accidentally, we really have to limit the number of team members who have access to the editable Figma files. This can put an extra burden on those who can update because they are solely responsible for updates during sprint, but it's the only way we can ensure components aren't unintentionally changed.
I have not dealt personally with support, but the online resources are sufficient.
Figma had the most powerful features for custom built development. UXPin is still a good out of the box choice for teams that don't want to build or maintain their own library, but Figma is what we needed to build and present a new custom UI for our product.
Figma is great for teams that have a dedicated employee to manage the library of elements in Figma. It is also great for teams that need exact pixel measurements and colors with developer ready HTML. If your team only needs a rough mockup, look for something else like UXPin or Balsamiq.

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