Figma Design

My top 3 highlights for Figma design are: 1. Prototyping- It offers a good variety of fun animations and transitions for prototyping, which gives a good essence to the client of how their end product will look like, how the website/app will be moving and the overall flow of the tool 2. Collaboration features - UI/UX is a domain where you simply can't work alone, you work as a team. This collaboration feature is a blessing as the whole team can be on the same page, see the updates in real-time and can even make changes or add their inputs as well. 3. AI Integration - This feature is new, but it's growing on me. Figma is leveraging the use of AI in their tool, which helps with brainstorming sessions and much more research related work. However, since AI is a new feature, maybe we need more in-depth understanding of this.

Some things stand out on Figma (besides organising our designs onto different items) - like commenting on designs where feedback is needed, sharing files with teammates (on a permission level), manipulating designs to become vectors (that can be repurposed and reused across the board).

Ease of use: Figma is incredibly intuitive, making it accessible even for non-technical team members. It allows everyone from product managers to marketing members to jump into canvas and collaborate without a steep learning curve. Figma Make: The Make feature allows us to turn text prompts and rough ideas into functional, interactive designs instantly. MCP Integration: The ability to use MCP with Figma has revolutionized our design-to-code handoff. It provides a universal translator that lets our AI coding assistants read the exact design context directly from Figma, ensuring our implementation at our company is pixel-perfect and highly efficient.

Firstly, not a huge fan of the free version - as the provided features are very limited like only 2 people can collaborate and only 1 project is allowed and to get a better hold of the tool one is kind of forced to get the paid version so a few more features can help the user to understand the tool and decide their vendor accordingly. Secondly, Figma design needs good stable internet connection- so a good feature is also a problem that though you can access it anywhere but with an internet connection which unfortunately you don't find everywhere. And lastly it goes crazy once your file becomes heavy it doesn't do well with large data and it starts lagging

Few things - for projects which involve many major milestones like website revamp/redesign, it can get a bit messy with layers and components piling up. Aside from lagging components for animations - Figma doesn't have inbuilt animation tools that'll help us demonstrate product prototypes. Instead, we currently brief our requirements to our Creative team (it's not a very dramatic issue since we do have basic animation functionality, especially for apps). Also, we're a bit limited with user testing, which is very important because we always want to measure what users interact with - we always want to validate what designs work most. Having an integrated user testing tool would be super beneficial...

Performance with heavy files: For a massive project like the our company's mobile app, the canvas can sometimes become stuttery, requiring us to split designs into multiple files to maintain speed. AI Credit Consumption: While the new Figma Make and AI features are revolutionary for our workflow at Istanbul Airport, the AI credits consume far too quickly. Navigation & File Management: Despite the UI/UX of the design canvas being exceptionally intuitive, the home screen and file organization can be cluttered. Finding specific projects or older versions among hundreds of files for the mobile app and our platform is sometimes a struggle, as the dashboard lacks a more robust and customizable folder hierarchy.