How Figma moved the design needle
Adobe’s acquisition of collaborative design tool Figma for a whopping $20 billion has been tech’s latest breakout star. Why? It’s a combination of a stellar team and a bold idea that, when paired together in an overlooked industry, ultimately created a company worth more than Spotify ($19.B), Snap ($19.4B), or Coinbase ($17B).
Figma has moved the needle where other web-based tools like Google Docs and Sheets have been incremental. But will Figma retain its user-friendly ethos, keep many features free, and continue to innovate under Adobe? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I explored Figma’s value proposition and asked my friends: “What do you love about using Figma?” Read more to find out what they said.
Easy-to-use but powerful:
Figma is a design-oriented company that makes sleek products through decisions that are grounded in best practices.
According to Don Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, there are five fundamental psychological concepts in design: Affordability, Signifiers, Feedback, Mappings, and Conceptual Models.
My friend, Anna, a Digital Media Design student at Penn, commented on Figma’s use of Signifiers and Feedback to promote collaboration:
Signifiers signal appropriate actions/behaviors. An example of a signifier that signals collaboration in Figma is other users’ cursors appearing on one’s screen. Also, the app's top bar is a signifier for other users present on the file to know who’s currently viewing the file.
Feedback: Other users’ cursors change in real-time as they move around the file. This feedback is instantaneous and shows a user what other users are doing in the file.
Figma is so easy to use, but don’t just take my word for it. Listen to Khushi Shelat, who was a Friends of Figma student leader:
In the product itself, it’s really easy to understand exactly how to use the basic features that are necessary for a design, and it makes you feel smart and able to build designs. Immediate wow factor.
A small thing, but I love their thoughtfulness in features like exact alignment, horizontal and vertical spacing, ease of picture fills and picture shaping, easy drop shadow aesthetic, and lines and shapes that can be moved and changed very intuitively.
A great example of Figma’s ease of use is its killer whiteboard feature: Figjam.
Have you tried using the whiteboard feature on Zoom to share your ideas? To put it simply, it's horrible.
This summer, my roommate, Justin Zhou, who was working as a Product Engineer at Infinitus, showed me Figjam, a product that enables teams to ideate together. On the Figjam landing page, on Desktop, you land directly into a product demo. The team knows it built an intuitive and user-friendly product, so the team does not hesitate to flaunt Figjam.
Integration with mobile, web, and people:
Figma seamlessly integrates with modern tech development stacks because it was built with both designers and engineers in mind.
My friend Eli Nathan, who recently worked in Product Design at GoPuff, raves about Figma’s focus on collaboration:
Until Figma, there was no design tool that made working with other designers easy. There was always saving and making sure you were working on the most up-to-date file. It sucked. Figma makes working with others dumb easy, which is crucial when you have multiple designers, as almost all teams do.
Every few months, Eli says there is a new update to Figma that makes the quality of life as a designer easier. One such update was component variants and version control, which worked seamlessly down to the small UX details.
Even by sharing a link with developers, they immediately have access to the measurements and digital assets. This is a key advantage over Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator in that there is one source of truth: the Figma link. It has the most updated version as opposed to sharing files with ridiculous names like “Mobile_Launch_Mock_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL.ai“
And when I said this product specifically keeps engineers in mind, I wasn’t joking.
Figma’s prototyping empowers both designers and engineers who are designing a mobile app to share interactive prototypes that you can test directly on smartphones. All with no code. Imagine how many hours this feature has saved developers.
The acquisition seems anti-competitive, though…
Figma is so good that a legitimate concern is that Adobe is paying $20B to buy out a competitor, i.e., Adobe might be worthy of antitrust scrutiny. Illegal anti-competitive behavior often feels fuzzy, but after taking two Internet Law classes, I realize it’s more well-defined than we think.
From my previous post, “Why did the FTC sue Facebook, again? Facebook lacks innovation.”
“The unifying theme of the [FTC’s] Guidelines is that mergers should not be permitted to create, enhance, or entrench market power or to facilitate its exercise… A merger can enhance market power simply by eliminating competition between the merging parties. This effect can arise even if the merger causes no changes in the way other firms behave.”
One class of evidence the FTC examines is about “actual effects observed” or, in other words, price. If Figma began removing features from its free tier, raising prices, or removing the free tier entirely, this might make the FTC pay more attention. But none of that has happened yet.
However, there are two classes of evidence that are already more concerning – “concentration of market share” and “substantial head-to-head competition.” Just ask your nearest neighborhood designer how much Figma is a stellar substitute for Adobe’s products like Photoshop and illustrator, and you’ll understand why the FTC might become more interested in this acquisition.
I don’t think we will see any antitrust suits brought against Adobe, though. But perhaps we should be worried about what changes will result from this hefty acquisition. Will Figma continue to be the product we’ve come to know and love?
Tell me, why do you think Figma is so special? I’d love to hear in the comments below.
And if you’re curious, feel free to check out these resources:
A collection of useful templates created and shared by designers and creators in the Figma Community
This post by Manuele Capacci tells you all about the cool things Figma can do today
Thanks to Anushka Agarwal and Pia Singh for reading drafts of this.
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