If you’re not already familiar, Figma is a collaborative, cloud-based design tool used primarily for interface design. It’s similar to platforms such as Sketch and Adobe XD, but the web application surpasses these when it comes to team collaboration, file organization, sharing designs with clients, prototyping, and maintains a fast and easy learning curve. 

Team Collaboration

Similar to Google Docs, Figma shows you real-time collaboration, when a team member is viewing and/or editing a design file. When working on a project, you can see their cursor move across the screen, making edits or leaving comments. Anyone with the link can open up a project simply on their browser and get a live version of what the designer is creating. This type of collaboration can help tremendously to mitigate errors, control the work being done, and save time publishing files each time feedback from the team is needed. Users can be notified right away when an edit or change has been made and be tagged in comments for review. Figma also has a seamless integration with Slack. A dedicated Figma channel can be created in Slack, where comments left on project files will be slacked to the team. This helps to reduce communication problems especially with designers and developers working on the site.

File Organization and Sharing

Saving and organizing files systematically throughout a team or entire company can oftentimes be cumbersome. Figma truly makes this process simple and easy to implement. Files can be organized into teams and within those teams, different project files. Within a project file, there are pages to indicate different components of a given design. Figma allows users to create thumbnails for certain projects to give a visual representation of what is located where. Because Figma is a cloud-based platform, sharing and viewing files becomes a whole lot simpler. Each file has its own unique link that can be shared with team members, clients, stakeholders, etc. 

Prototyping

The prototyping feature of Figma is a great tool when demonstrating how a site mockup functions and simple interactions that allows users to navigate pages. Learning to prototype is also very easy and straightforward, even for non-designers to explore. Another great advantage of prototyping in Figma is that the link is entirely separate from the file link. When sending out a prototype link, a viewer can only see the project in presentation mode, being able to better visualize what a site or application would look like live. When working with clients, this is very helpful to send quick professional visual guides to projects that are in progress. 

Easy Learning Curve

Comparatively, Figma is probably one of the most intuitive, easy to use platforms out there. Of course, if you know some of the basics of Photoshop or Illustrator it might be easier as a designer. However, even being completely new to the application it’s simple and easy to get in and play around with the tools. There’s also an entire library of helpful tutorials and youtube videos to walk you through the application and its many functionalities. 

Figma has become an essential tool for our business over the past year and has helped us tremendously from creating and storing files, to easily sharing prototypes and new designs to our growing client base. Figma has become an essential tool, not only in the UI Design space but throughout various large companies and businesses to collaborate with their team, and share everything seamlessly on a single cloud-based platform.