UX design: Tools, methods and frameworks for generalists(nickdewilde.substack.com)
nickdewilde.substack.com
UX design: Tools, methods and frameworks for generalists
https://nickdewilde.substack.com/p/the-keyring-zac-halbert-on-ux-design
6 comments
Good questions. For future versions of this I may try to get guests to answer more questions about challenges in their profession to spark interesting ideas for entrepreneurs trying to build solutions.
Great question. Figma is leaps and bounds closer to giving designers tools that work like code, but it still has a long way to go. My wish list design tool is something that has the creative flexibility of design canvas, but the power of clean, performant code. Truthfully I think it'll require evolution both in the design tools space, but also the HTML and CSS specs.
For instance, in Figma we've only had a reliable way of adding something simple like button padding (where you can create a reusable button that will expand as you type a longer label) for a year. There have been plugins that did it before that, but they weren't reliable. This is crazy when you consider you've had the ability to add padding to a box in CSS for decades. At the same time, try doing a complex layout in HTML/CSS, which requires you to learn about flexbox, floats, position, and/or CSS grid. Compare that to the ability to just draw a box, move, scale, and rotate it in a design tool.
So I see design tools and browser tools converging over time to allow designers, engineers, even product managers a layer of abstraction over interfaces that feels much more intuitive, with less duplication. Right now, I have components in Figma that mirror components we use in React, though this is usually manual effort which is also a bit crazy. I don't really count WYSIWYG editors as having figured this out yet, since they produce garbage code in my experience.
For instance, in Figma we've only had a reliable way of adding something simple like button padding (where you can create a reusable button that will expand as you type a longer label) for a year. There have been plugins that did it before that, but they weren't reliable. This is crazy when you consider you've had the ability to add padding to a box in CSS for decades. At the same time, try doing a complex layout in HTML/CSS, which requires you to learn about flexbox, floats, position, and/or CSS grid. Compare that to the ability to just draw a box, move, scale, and rotate it in a design tool.
So I see design tools and browser tools converging over time to allow designers, engineers, even product managers a layer of abstraction over interfaces that feels much more intuitive, with less duplication. Right now, I have components in Figma that mirror components we use in React, though this is usually manual effort which is also a bit crazy. I don't really count WYSIWYG editors as having figured this out yet, since they produce garbage code in my experience.
It would be nice to be able to style things with CSS in figma, not just export the CSS
Figma UX is quite bad as it doesn't work without an internet connection.
To op, for tools like Figma, what do you think the future holds? In what dimension will they evolve? How can they help you be more effective? Will they help you express your ideas in ever higher fidelity over time? [1]
[1] Biased questions, but genuinely curious about the op's answers given his deep expertise in the field (as the founder of https://mintdata.com)