What design really asks, according to Kuwamoto, is: “How do we make sure that we’re building the best thing - the thing that solves the problem the best, or what people resonate with the most?” As a result, everybody cares about the design that goes into their products.” As Kuwamoto pointed out, “Everybody now recognizes that design is the heart of what makes a product good - and people respond to that. It’s not only that companies that invest in good design give themselves an edge against their competitors. Now everybody understands that design is actually this thing that everybody participates in.”ĭesign is the heart of what makes a product good.”įigma’s team also hopes their work will finally quash the idea that design is an afterthought when compared to product functionality. Designers would go off into their secret room and they’d come back and give us a design.
COLLABORATIVE FIGMA FIGJAMCROOKTECHCRUNCH SOFTWARE
As someone who has worked in the software industry for more than two decades, Kuwamoto’s seen it all: “In the old days, you used to think design was this magic thing. To Figma’s director of product, this refers to both the importance of design and the people involved in creating it. Now it’s a comfortable and normal experience.”įigma operates on the idea that we’re in the “decade of design” - an era where good design isn’t an option so much as it is a necessity, an expectation.
But a lot of designers have never really seen other people in the same file as them while they work. She compared the eventual shift in mindset to the team’s collective comfort with text editors like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper: “We’re used to watching each other type and make typos, and that’s not a weird thing anymore.
It took some encouragement to get our team to work in the open,” said Engineering Director Jessica Liu. “In the early days, a lot of our designers were still used to perfecting their mocks before sharing them out. That’s not to say there wasn’t a little learning curve even within Figma’s team. “I didn’t have any real experience in design myself before coming to Figma, but every other way that we were working was collaborative.”
But to incorporate flow into the process by collaborating in real time to eliminate the stop-and-go of feedback and edits? “It instantly made sense to me,” she said. How would feedback fit into the process? How would stakeholders remain invested in the final product if they could see its incremental development? “Having everybody jam on stuff is clearly the faster way to go, but back then, it wasn’t clear at all.”įrom Butler’s perspective as a marketer, the change was a welcome one in comparison to the old-school process of receiving a PDF, sharing feedback in bullet points and waiting. “There was this idea that online collaboration was actually going to make everybody’s jobs harder,” said Kuwamoto. Hesitation lingered because this wasn’t how design flow worked. But the idea wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms following its closed beta release in late 2015. In an era where distributed teams and asynchronous work are becoming the norm, Figma’s dream of creating an accessible, streamlined place for real-time collaboration sounds like a no-brainer. “That shift has really permeated not just product design, but also how teams collaborate with each other in a more open way that they weren’t doing back in 2015,” said Butler. Companies like Google, The New York Times and Airbnb now use the collaborative tool to create their own products. “We had this idea that Figma was going to change the way that people did product design.” By opening up more seats at the design table, users would be able to solve design challenges more effectively.įast forward seven years and the industry has since adapted to this new way of work. “Because design is something where you, almost by definition, are working with other people - you’re getting ideas, you’re getting feedback - we thought it was really important to bring that online and onto the web,” he explained. It would be a major redefinition of the design software ecosystem, but one that made fundamental sense to Figma’s director of product, Sho Kuwamoto. But getting an entire community to adjust from a world where people were used to running design software directly on their computers wasn’t easy. Having an idea for a product that might actually cause more people to join the design community was exciting for the team. “I always like to think about that, because we’ve gotten to the point now where we’re so ubiquitous across product design,” said Claire Butler, Figma’s head of community marketing.