Website and app design is evolving continuously over the years. The focus is shifting to user experience and shortening the design cycles. This has given rise to the need of introducing new design tools for collaboration and prototyping.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has had a huge impact on how businesses operate in numerous ways. One of them is compelling organizations to transition to working from home. Secondly, it influenced organizations to kick off their digital plans like building apps and websites to continue operations.

The question arises, how did all these affect designers and their careers? Design teams started working from home and thus required great tools for collaboration to increase their productivity. The demand for websites and mobile apps increased resulting in an increased demand for organizations to shorten their design cycles.

The designers needed a new tool that will help them design well, create rapid prototypes and collaborate efficiently. This is where Figma made its entrance.

Figma is a design tool that helps create designs for mobile apps and website interfaces. it was launched in 2016 when Sketch and Adobe were ruling the design world. But what all these tools lacked, Figma offered them in its versatility, usability, and the ability for teamwork.

It rapidly became the only trustworthy tool that designers and non-designers used together. One reason why Figma gained popularity is the seamless and frictionless way to share files with stakeholders and the features of working in real-time. It is also focused on collaborating with teams and individual users to create and share their work.

In a recent worldwide survey, a massive number of Product, UI, UX, and Web Designers ranked Figma as the most famous tool for the UI/UX field. It is used for every design aspect from fine-tuning UI design to prototyping, as well as versioning and managing collaborative design systems.

Figma is also used by major tech companies like Netflix and Twitter. It is a valuable tool to learn if you want to start a career in UI/UX.  In this article, we will highlight why Figma best suits designers.

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Real-time collaboration

The most obvious feature of Figma is that it is equipped with real-time collaboration, which means that designers can create their designs in live mode. Developers, stakeholders, and project managers can see the designs live. Developers can code at the same time the designer creates designs. They can give feedback to each other at the same time. By sharing just one link, the entire team has access to the designs. Real-time sharing helps the designer avoid misinterpretation. The design lead can intervene and correct the course in real time. This saves a huge amount of time for the entire team.

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Browser based

Figma works on any web browser, be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or even Chromebooks. It works even if the internet is not available and has the feature of autosave. In organizations, it often happens that designers and developers use different browsers and operating systems. Figma brings them together because of its universal nature.

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Prototyping

There are numerous reasons why designers love Figma, and one of them is prototyping. It is extremely simple to create micro-interactions, animations, and prototypes in Figma. This helps designers keep all of their design elements seamlessly and neatly in a single place.

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Slack Integration

Figma uses Slack as its communication channel. With slack integration, when a Figma channel is created, all comments or editing is slacked to the design team. This feature is vital when designing live. Designers can work more effectively because they can catch errors sooner and thus make necessary changes.

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Handoff facilitation

When an object or frame is selected in CSS, iOS, or Android formats, Figma displays code snippets for them. This way it becomes easy for designers to inspect any file they view. The need to use third-party tools is no longer there.

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Online whiteboard - FIGJAM

Another amazing feature for remote workers is FigJam. It is an online whiteboard that the entire team can use simultaneously for brainstorming ideas, developing workflows, and planning. It is particularly effective for team meetings. It is intuitive and non-designers love it equally.

Layout Grid

Layout grids are visual guides that help designers stay consistent in their designs. Figma brings further innovation to this feature.

• Simple grid - you can set the size yourself
• Column and row grid - vertical and horizontal where you can set margins, number of rows and columns, and widths.

Another great feature of the grid is that when the frame size is edited, the object within it automatically aligns according to the change.

Along with these, Figma also offers four alignment options, left, right, center and stretch.

Free of cost

For individuals or a team of 2, Figma is completely free. It charges when there are more than 2 editors in a project.

Easy to learn

Figma’s learning curves are very similar to Adobe and Sketch which makes it easy to learn. Even if you don't know a lot about photoshop, by trying out tools on Figma, in a couple of hours of playing around you will be able to know the tools a lot better. With Figma’s free online tutorials the learning process becomes even easier. Everything is explained with immense detail. It also comes with UX design tutorials which is a plus.

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Community

Figma is also a great platform for designers and engineers from all over the world. They create plugins to share their work with everyone. All you need to do is make a few changes according to your liking and you’re good to go. For UI design some plugins are used most frequently.

• Unsplash - a wide variety of wallpapers that are great looking and free as well. All you need to do is drag and drop without leaving Figma.
• Iconify - a lifesaver for designers who used to make their icons. Figma has made available thousands of icons that can be dragged and dropped.
• Mapsicle - you can create a map for your design. All you have to do is just enter the coordinates and choose a map style, and click “create map”.
• Charts - for designing reporting pages, stats, and infographics, this is a great plugin. It generates automatic charts.

Better project management

Figma helps teams and managers efficiently manage their projects. It increases team productivity by helping team members work simultaneously on the projects. By providing designers with codes of numerous design elements and offering real-time feedback options, Figma proved itself to be an asset for project management teams across organizations.

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Team libraries

Organizations across the world use design systems. There is a dire need for these systems to be sustainable, scalable, reusable, and tokenized for use in the pattern libraries being accessible to UX designers and front-end developers.  A Figma team library is a great resource for the teams that have access to it. They have the most latest versions of designs available to work with. Designers can create files that are full of components or use on-page components to organize a pattern library. Each frame in a Figma page becomes the organizational section in the team library.

Designers speak in a language of their own. They have an eye to appreciate things that non-designers don't even notice. Figma knew this, so they built features to make the designers happy clients. Some of these amazing features are:

• Layout grids for superior visual structure
• An auto-layout eliminates the requirement to resize everything constantly
• Team libraries that keep everything categorized and optimized
• Interactive components that allow for real-time collaboration

Figma is the first interface design tool that offers real-time collaboration. Designers and front-end developers have significantly started using Figma to design apps and web applications. Figma has taken the design world by storm and continues to do so with its new features and updates every day.

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