That’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers.
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
Well, with an established competitor like Sketch, you can laugh your way to the bank. SO many users pleaded their first born children to Sketch if they could have cross platform support, web-view support, real time collab, commenting system, cloud support, buit-in Developer handoff, nested components, auto-layouts - even just one of the above.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
The current product _must_ simply be a funding mechanism for whatever AI solution will ultimately define them. The idea that we’ll continue to have rigidly defined design mockups and specification seems relatively naive compared to generative UX defined by the user and their interaction preferences.
Most of the offering is from current shareholders, not new shares issued. That’s non-dilutive I presume but also raises less funds for the company. Who has the privilege of selling at offer time? Employees I imagine are locked up and the stock will take a dump in 6 months.
Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns.
We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs. To be a good designer today you have to learn to actively reject what Figma teaches you.
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first.
And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”.
It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
I remember the first viral blog posts about the drawing tools made for Figma. It was amazing to see so much love and attention to detail with the basic tools done so right. It reminded me more of FreeHand or Canvas or Xara than Adobe, which was a great thing. But those diamonds are now lost in the rough of a bad user interface and an app that has become progressively slower over the years. And we're still missing basic tools that the classic apps I mentioned had 35 years ago.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] threadCongrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
https://madebyevan.com/figma/
https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE.
What an incredible journey!
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first. And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”. It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346
is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?