Figma's only interest is revenue, and it's going to erode the design culture
Figma is immature about design, and immature with their financial goals. Unable to make both work, they choose to make money, destroying the design culture in the process.
Figma founders never cared about designers; they needed a use case for their real-time web-based app. That’s how it came about.
Figma never cared about User Experience or Human-Centric design. There are cases of bad design patterns and inconsistencies all over the Figma product and it’s never getting fixed, because;
Figma never cared about the design community. By ignoring its own UX problems for years, it normalised the ignorance towards customers' needs and normalised bad design patterns, spreading a bad influence on a whole generation of designers.
Figma never cared about customers. Instead of working on core product they waste resources on projects nobody asked for (FigJam) to sell it separately. Recently they cut off a chunk of the core product, called it a "Dev mode," and sold it back to customers for an additional cost.
Annotations. Design is very much about communication, and annotations is one of core functions for communication. Not just for developer handoff, it’s a necessity if you are doing a presentation, making a PDF, or printing out the design, or archiving.
Annotations support was always lagging behind and being fulfilled by plugins, starting from Sketch years, where it was done with Sketch Measure. With Figma, it was all forgotten for 6 years, until we got annotations through plugins. But then again using plugins in Figma is a UX nightmare.
Figma didn’t suddenly decide to release annotations feature now, after sleeping on it for 7 years. Annotations feature is developed as part of Dev mode, the additional cost feature.
That in part explains why the product is full of holes, promotes and normalises bad UX, and why Figma team ignore all these issues; there’s no money in it.
Forget about bug fixes and don’t expect new features unless they find a way to charge for that.
In essence it’s still two guys with tech demo who stumbled on idea of design tool while looking for monetisation use case for their platform. They didn’t become designers. Even if they hired designers, the product is not driven by designers. They just want to make money off it.
The whole Figjam story is a telling example. The whiteboard tool was a low-hanging fruit for a new revenue source. Remember what we all wanted from Figma? Animation support, bitmap editing, iPad app. None of that, too complicated and difficult to monetise. Figjam was released with an actual iPad app for it, with actual editing and pen support! Like the app we were all waiting for years, for Figma itself. And Figma iPad app still not even planned. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventual app released be sold for additional cost.
Figjam was the golden child, then it was the Dev mode. But they won’t touch to improve core Figma no matter what. There’s no features in there to fix and sell as new. I imagine they thought really hard about how to monetise variables. Probably have internal slides in Figjam proposing to price 100 variables for $5/month.
And just as I was writing this, on 20 February in an interview Figma CEO says, "Figma is never meant to be just a design tool." Now they are looking into adding AI. Of course they are.
But how about fixing your goddamn product first?
In a year, there will be a new paid Figma AI feature and the same broken core product.
What those priorities tell you about this huge company in the center of the world’s UI/UX design community? It’s a company that couldn’t care less about designers.
Unable to do both, they chose to make money, neglecting the design calling.
If a design tool was created and driven by a team of designers who truly cared about making things better for people, we could be living in a different world now. This could mean simpler, more user-friendly tools that focus on solving real problems and helping users effectively. And tools that are designed properly giving new generations of designers something to look up to. Influence could lead to more thoughtful, practical, and considerate design solutions that improve everyday experiences for everyone.
But instead we got these two guys trying to monetise their real time web collaboration engine and wrecking the world in process.