Why Figma is a Winning Product
This is a follow-up to the Multiplayer Products post, and its more recent, more mature sibling Winning Products. I received some great feedback on Winning Products and wanted to follow up with a product-design-specific example: Figma.
Figma is a Winning Product. For a product designer, it solves the problem of “creating and producing product design” better than any other application. It’s also first in mind. For designers who’ve used it, it doesn’t matter whether they’re designing a mobile app, website, or goofy birthday card… Figma comes to mind first.
How was Figma able to create a Winning Product?
There are two rules for designing Winning Products (see the post for more). The first: start with a single primitive. Figma’s single primitive is its Design File.
Any time you go to design something in Figma, you create a new Design File in the file menu, or by adding a new tab. The single primitive is so powerful because designers go to the same place, no matter the type of design. Whether it’s a mobile app for a friend’s startup, or a new design system component, the Design File is the same.
This removes friction any time you would go to design something new. It also compounds mastery of the tool. If you don’t have to relearn a new interface for the different types of design work you do, you can produce better designs more rapidly. This creates a reinforcing loop for the designer.
How is Figma different?
Figma is built using existing solutions that are well understood and used in other world-class products. They don’t reinvent the wheel. To illustrate this, it might help to compare Figma to one of its competitors and predecessors: Sketch.
In the early days of Figma, the primary design interface—their Design File—was not as good as Sketch. Sketch had a better interface, was more refined, and had more common features reminiscent of its predecessor Adobe Illustrator.
While Sketch may have had a better creation interface, the product had a myopic view of the problem it was solving. Figma was able to better solve the problem for designers by cobbling together existing solutions.
Cloud storage
Figma autosaves, and stores all data by default, like magic. With Sketch, you had to use a cloud storage service like Dropbox, or a separate tool that helped version control your designs. Figma does this by default.
Sharing
For any file or specific piece of design, Figma gives you an easily shareable weblink. No one you share it with needs to download an application. You can share your designs with anyone, instantly, for free.
Collaboration and multiplayer
It’s funny to think about software tools before open collaboration. Like Microsoft Word before Google Docs. Figma enabled multiple designers to work on the same file, the same design. Where before, you’d have to save and send files back and forth.
Implementing the design
Collaborating with an engineering team is also part of a designer’s job. Without Figma, you can use a tool like Zepelin to get CSS properties and dimensions out of your designs. With Figma, it’s all built-in and accessible by default.
Prototyping
A separate app like InVision would be used to create life-like interactive prototypes. With Figma, you don’t have to export your designs, you can create shareable interactive prototypes right in the Design File.
In one swoop, Figma replaced six-or-so products, making it the best-in-class solution for a designer. With the Design File, any time the designer wants to create a new design, they jump in to Figma. Reinforcing the loop that Figma solves the problem best, and increasingly making the designer a master of this tool.