Item: Figma
Rating: 10
Author: Andrew Richardson

Overall Satisfaction with Figma

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Figma is being used as a prototype tool for digital design within our Marketing department. It helps to illustrate how a product will work before it is actually built to get buy-in from stakeholders. We use it to wireframe, do high fidelity mockups and create documentation for developers to use when creating the final product.

Pros and Cons

Pros

A building block for a design system.
Screen-based prototyping.
Collaboration with stakeholders.

Cons

UI is not very intuitive as a viewer who's not familiar with other similar software.
Structuring large projects with multiple moving parts is a pretty large overhead.
Version control is almost non-existent so keeping track of changes is very difficult.

Return on Investment

Figma has allowed our design team to move faster and open up the design process to become more collaborative.
Multiple designers can be working on the same project at the same time which means production work is cut down drastically.
It gives people confidence in knowing that what they are looking at is the latest version.

Alternatives Considered

Sketch, Adobe Photoshop and InVision

Figma wins against these because of the rate they are iterating on the product. Sketch initially disrupted the market but Figma took their initial idea and layered collaboration as a core concept on top of that and has been releasing features at a breakneck pace. It initially launched with some features missing from what Sketch had but it's added all the features Sketch has AND surpassed them to the point that Sketch is now playing catch up to Figma. The lead Figma now has feels pretty hard to match at this point.

Support Rating

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Figma delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Figma's feature set?

Yes

Did Figma live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Figma go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Figma again?

Yes

Other Software Used

GitHub, Slack, Concur Travel and Expense

Likelihood to Recommend

Figma is a fantastic collaborative digital design tool. It allows you to create prototypes and design documentation to the same level as Sketch or other tools and has a real-time collaboration feature built on top of it. It came out with that feature in mind so it's built around that idea as opposed to finding a way to put it in later. This is a real advantage as inviting people to see your work is incredibly easy and they can then use your work to communicate what's happening rather than spending many hours in meetings showing everyone from the file you have on a hard drive that no one else can open.

Comments

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Figma is ahead by a mile in the prototype tool race