Пример
Why Figma?
When I first met Dylan (co-founder and CEO of Figma) a few years ago, I was skeptical that a full-featured design tool could be built with browser technology. Since then, the team has quickly proven me wrong with their ability to keep up with modern design needs like design systems, responsive components, and prototyping — all the while inventing their own new paradigms like multiplayer and vector networks. Figma has become a serious high quality tool in just a single year of being publicly available.
Excited about this progress, I introduced Figma to our team at ClassPass. I was managing the design team there for over a year at the time and Figma quickly became one of our primary design tools. It dramatically improved our product development process:
- We started co-creating and reviewing designs in real time during our critiques to reduce back and forth or ambiguous feedback. Instead of asking “have you thought about this?”, we simply tried suggestions in context together.
- We moved faster by having multiple roles collaborate in our design files. Our PM, marketing, and legal teams explored copy on their own so they could understand the impact of text length in layout, saving us the menial time of updating, re-exporting, and sending back each iteration. Our engineers measured or exported assets as they needed to. Our CEO included comments in context of the designs themselves instead of email.
- Our product teams finally had a single link as the source of truth for our latest designs. Since files in Figma are always up to date, PMs and engineers no longer needed to install an app or download yet another version of: Dashboard-2.1.4-NL-Final-Design-I-Promise-This-Time.sketch
I loved seeing how Figma improved our process. So when Dylan reached out to say they were looking for a Design Manager, I was excited to learn more about the team behind the product I’d been enjoying.
Some thoughts on the future of design tools
Early on in my design career, I thought it was my sole responsibility to design the product to best meet the goals of the team. I thought I was supposed to go into a room, potentially with a few other designers, and leave the room with the plan of what to build. Then I was supposed to spend time explaining the idea to the rest of the team.
I quickly learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fortunately, I had a fantastic teacher to correct this misunderstanding while working at Google. Our engineering lead, Dan, would show up in our design area and ask us what we were working on. I remember getting defensive, wondering why he was here in the “design room,” and telling him that we needed more time to figure things out. Instead of getting defensive in return, he simply started suggesting ideas and improvements to what we were working on. Each idea was better than the last, which made me excited…but also a bit confused. Who was this non-designer with all of these fantastic design ideas?
Some thoughts on the future of design tools
Early on in my design career, I thought it was my sole responsibility to design the product to best meet the goals of the team. I thought I was supposed to go into a room, potentially with a few other designers, and leave the room with the plan of what to build. Then I was supposed to spend time explaining the idea to the rest of the team.
I quickly learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fortunately, I had a fantastic teacher to correct this misunderstanding while working at Google. Our engineering lead, Dan, would show up in our design area and ask us what we were working on. I remember getting defensive, wondering why he was here in the “design room,” and telling him that we needed more time to figure things out. Instead of getting defensive in return, he simply started suggesting ideas and improvements to what we were working on. Each idea was better than the last, which made me excited…but also a bit confused. Who was this non-designer with all of these fantastic design ideas?