Enhancing communication to bring teams closer together on Figma

Team

Solo project

Skills

Generative Research
Wireframing
Prototyping

Duration

January 2024
3 day sprint

Opportunity

As design teams become increasingly distributed, there's an opportunity to evolve Figma to better support discussions

While comments facilitate quick responses, teams working on complex projects find themselves choosing between lengthy text threads or scheduling additional meetings. This creates friction in collaboration, particularly for remote and global teams.

Solution

Enable users to exchange detailed ideas by supporting multimedia comments

Through the comments feature, users can embed voice or canvas recordings to help users follow along.

Adding recordings

Adding recordings to comments is similar adding images or GIFs, enabling users to leverage text and media

Reviewing comments

Users view canvas recordings via a modal, similar to previewing frames, that they can also resize or move to support visibility

Discovery

To understand how users communicate in Figma, I interviewed 5 product team members across different roles

My research focused on learning how teams handle complex design discussions and where existing collaboration tools, including Figma, fall short.

Key Research Insights

Meeting Fatigue is Real

Teams resort to meetings when comments become insufficient, but this creates new problems. For distributed teams, finding meeting times across time zones is challenging. Even when possible, excessive meetings interrupt deep work and drain productivity.

Text-Only Communication Creates Friction

Writing detailed explanations is time-consuming and often unclear. Tone and context are easily lost, which are crucial when working with clients or in cross-cultural teams.

Team Knowledge Barriers

Teams naturally develop their own workflows combining several tools, including Figma, Slack, Teams, and Loom. But this creates fragmented communication across multiple platforms, inconsistent documentation practices, and time-intensive onboarding for new team members.

From Insights to Opportunities

Analyzing these pain points revealed three key opportunity areas

Since I had an incoming deadline, I started narrowing use cases to delve deeper with design opportunities. After affinity mapping, I selected my direction based on frequency in user interviews as well as my perception of their importance.

Design Strategy

Based on interview frequency and potential impact, I identified three key use cases to address

Design Critique and Feedback
High-priority due to frequency and direct impact on design quality. Includes supporting complex decision rationale, enabling clear visual explanations, facilitating async review

Development Handoff
Critical for reducing implementation errors and dev cycles. Communicating interaction specifics, explaining behavior, or documenting edge cases

Team Knowledge Sharing
Key for team scalability and consistency. Includes onboarding, creating reusable documentation, Maintaining design system guidelines

Intial Ideation

Based on these insights and use cases, I started generating potential solutions

Using rapid ideation techniques (Crazy 8s), I explored solutions ranging from incremental improvements to radical reimagining of design collaboration. Three promising directions emerged:

Option 1: Multimedia Comments

I explored letting users add voice and screen recordings directly within comments, inspired by how designers often resort to Loom videos for complex explanations.