A warmer welcome to Figma
Summary
In this Figma design exploration, I addressed how the platform could better welcome a variety of skill levels, professions, and industries to the workspace and empower anyone to bring their vision to life.
I added two new features, Change of Scenery and Square One, that embed Figma’s creativity, community, and resources directly into the design workspace.
Key skills
User research
Visual design
Role
Designer
Timeline
1 week in 2021
On Figma’s ‘About’ page, they say, “We look forward to a future where design is even more collaborative, borderless, transparent, community-driven, and open-sourced.” I already believe they have been a huge part of building that reality, but I wanted to talk to people and see how we could redesign Figma and make it even better for a multitude of people, skills, and industries, not just industry product designers.
01 Talking to users
Before I approached redesigning a feature, I needed to hear how and why people used, liked, or disliked Figma and what needed a solution to begin with. I created an interview guide to explore three things: use cases, user flows, and Figma features. You can see the interview guides here. I recruited three very different participants, Andrew, Vanessa, and Zain and got to talk to them one on one for 30 minutes and see how they were feeling about Figma.
02 Uncovering key insights
The research led me to interesting insights about how different the Figma experience can be for users depending on their backgrounds, personalities, interests, and goals.
Key insights
Users come from everywhere.
The learning curve is different for everyone.
Different backgrounds result in different user journeys.
Users have different levels of motivation to explore Figma’s possibilities.
They find extremely inventive and interesting ways to communicate with one another on Figma.
When looking back at the research and the comparisons between users, the biggest differences were in how they described themselves. Product designer, strategist, manager. One even went further to emphasize, “I am not a designer.”
There is a notion that being a designer means you know how to use Figma better or more properly, but designing is not only practiced by designers. Everyone designs, and design is everywhere. Habit and personality can greatly affect someone’s motivation to learn new skills, but I wanted to explore what could change about Figma’s interface that could help the learning curve flatten out a bit. After all, Figma’s main purpose is to make design more accessible for everyone.
03 Define design goals
I focused in on one exciting question for this redesign: How might we welcome a variety of people to easily create projects for all of their different industries, teams, projects, and ideas?
Design goals
Enable users to think about creating, not just designing
Give users the tools to achieve what they’re thinking up
Open up the interface to a multitude of projects, approaches, and skill levels
Getting the ideas out
Some brainstorming quickly led to “modes” or “workspaces” as a more flexible way to meet the variety of Figma users.
The solutions
I added two new features, Square One and Change of Scenery, to make the blank Figma screen a little less intimidating and more welcoming.
01 Square One
Square One is a welcome modal that appears when users open a new file. They can easily move directly into Figma, but they can also browse tutorials, community inspiration, or start with a template. These opportunities allow for an easier start into a new project if a blank canvas is overwhelming or if a user doesn’t know exactly what they want to accomplish. It lets them start from square one and go wherever they want from there.
Most of the features I added to Square One are resources and tools Figma already makes available to all users, but adding them to this starting modal puts all of those wonderful tools right at users’ fingertips and lets them know these resources exist for them.
Learn something new
Easily browse new lessons that Figma offers about specific tools, concepts, or principles. Find tutorials needed to start a project or just browse to gain some new skills.
Start with a template
Get a head start by browsing community templates for presentations, websites, resumes, and a multitude more. Use templates to start quick projects and see how others are doing things.
Get inspired
See what the community is up to before getting started on a project. Get some ideas and see what’s possible by seeing how Spotify does things or how users teach classes with Figma.
02 Change of scenery
Change of Scenery allows users to pick different views of the workspace depending on the kind of project or goals they are trying to achieve. It utilizes the right-side panel to add in functionalities such as a chat box or a built-in community tab to give users access to everything they need while staying in their workspace. This feature focuses on the user flow once they are working on something, have a project going, and need some backup from their team, the community, or Figma tutorials.
Collaboration view
Learning view
Exploration view
In the end
Square One and Change of Scenery were how I chose to further connect Figma and the people who use it, and hopefully guide users to where they hope to go in their projects, teams, and design journeys.
One of the users said during their interview that, “People are learning Figma together, exploring it together.” And I really believe that Figma’s curious community and culture set it apart. Figma has the right resources and community to make the platform usable for so many different industries: education, business, research, amongst many more.
This redesign was just a matter of connecting users with those resources and letting them know they have all the backup they could need when tackling their objectives.