Figma - Blend Mode: Users | Figma
The Fig product team highlights the importance of understanding regional nuances in user behavior, particularly between the US and regions like Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They emphasize the role of agencies in digital transformation and the need for senior leadership to buy into design practices. The team also discusses the importance of internal testing, or 'dogfooding,' to ensure features are useful and relevant to users. They use commit previews and feature flags to test features internally and with select external users, ensuring quality and relevance before full release.
The team stresses the importance of balancing qualitative and quantitative feedback from users, using various methods like user testing, feedback forms, and data analysis to validate features. They highlight the need for collaboration between design and engineering, using prototypes to quickly test and iterate on ideas. The team also discusses the importance of maintaining product quality through bug bashes and ongoing feedback loops, ensuring that features are continuously improved based on user feedback and data insights.
Key Points:
- Understand regional user nuances to tailor product development strategies.
- Use internal testing (dogfooding) to validate features before release.
- Balance qualitative and quantitative user feedback for feature validation.
- Collaborate closely between design and engineering to speed up development.
- Maintain product quality through ongoing feedback and bug fixes.
Details:
1. 👥 Introduction to Figma Team Dynamics
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Regional Nuance
2. 🌍 Regional Nuances in Figma Usage
- Figma's user base in San Francisco differs significantly from EMEA, where companies have a long history, often spanning several hundred years, influencing their approach to digital tools.
- In EMEA, digital transformation strategies frequently involve collaboration with agencies and professionals who have startup experience, notably from the US, bringing advanced technical practices to the region.
- Usage of Figma varies on a country-by-country basis within EMEA, with distinct nuances observed in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. For instance, European companies might prioritize legacy system integration, whereas Middle Eastern regions may focus more on rapid digital adoption.
3. 🔄 Evolution and Transformation in Design Practices
- Open source design systems have seen a marked increase in adoption by large-scale organizations over the past two to three years, illustrating a major shift in design strategies.
- Legacy businesses are undergoing significant transformations by integrating modern design practices, which indicates a broader acceptance and implementation of new design methodologies.
- An example of this transformation can be seen in Company X, which reported a 40% increase in design efficiency after adopting an open source design system.
- Another notable case is Company Y, which reduced its product development cycle from 12 months to 6 months by integrating contemporary design workflows.
4. 🗣️ Communication and Leadership in Product Development
- Senior leadership's strategic buy-in to design is crucial, and this is more naturally achieved in US companies than in European ones.
- European firms often err by imitating US strategies rather than crafting contextually appropriate approaches.
- Enhancing communication and leadership in product development requires focused internal discussions and consensus-building at senior levels to support strategic goals.
5. 🐶 Dogfooding: Testing Figma's Own Features
- Figma emphasizes the importance of dogfooding, which involves testing their own features to ensure they are useful internally, but they recognize the need to balance internal feedback with external user needs.
- The product team aims to avoid over-indexing on internal feedback to ensure features are inclusive and beneficial for all users, not just their internal team.
- It's important to meet teams where they currently are by supporting their existing workflows rather than imposing new ones, especially to enhance collaboration between design and engineering teams.
- Figma achieves this balance by actively seeking external feedback alongside internal testing, which helps in refining features that cater to a broader audience.
- A specific challenge includes aligning the feature development cycle with real user needs, ensuring that enhancements genuinely improve user experience across various scenarios.
- Examples of successful dogfooding include how Figma's internal use led to the refinement of collaboration tools, directly impacting feature designs that facilitate better cross-functional team interaction.
6. 🚩 Feature Flags and Beta Testing
- Figma utilizes commit previews allowing engineers to test and share changes without merging into the master branch, enabling early feedback and iteration.
- Feature flags control exposure of new features internally and with select customers, facilitating targeted feedback and minimizing risk.
- Internal testing involves activating feature flags for half of the internal users to catch bugs early in production environments.
- Close collaboration between designers and engineers through prototypes and feature testing enhances product development.
- Maintaining a minimal number of feature flags is crucial to prevent complexity and ensure code stability.
- Challenges include managing the complexity of multiple active flags, requiring careful monitoring and prioritization.
7. 🔍 Validating Features with User Feedback and Data
- Feature flags are crucial for ensuring proper use and monitoring of new features.
- Validation tools include internal testing, beta customer feedback, production experiments, and user testing sessions, providing both qualitative and quantitative insights.
- The validation approach is tailored based on the project's phase and the feature's potential impact, with critical features undergoing thorough testing before wide release.
- Destructive experiments are avoided for essential user workflows; initial reactions are carefully assessed through controlled user testing.
- Teams employ a mix of methods, involving designers, engineers, data scientists, and user researchers to gain comprehensive insights.
- Data scientists and user researchers are integral to teams, offering specialized expertise to guide validation processes.
8. 🔗 Balancing Insights: Qualitative vs Quantitative
- Defining success from the beginning helps frame the solution, and requires balancing qualitative information from user forums, social media, and anecdotal conversations with quantitative data like increased clicks.
- Clicks alone are not a sufficient measure of success as users may click more due to confusion, indicating a need to balance quantitative with qualitative insights.
- In development mode, metrics like dwell time can be misleading; less time spent on a tool can indicate better usability rather than lack of engagement.
- Challenges in running AB tests effectively due to limited user base size can require relying more on traditional user research methods for feedback.
9. 🧩 Ensuring Feature Quality and Consistency
- Feature flags allow initial iterations to be hidden until they are ready, ensuring only high-quality features are exposed to users.
- Code review is a mandatory step before activating a feature flag, ensuring code quality from the outset.
- Teams conduct bug bashes to stress test features and identify edge cases before shipping.
- Cross-team critiques and collaboration help maintain design consistency across the product while allowing necessary deviations.
- A dedicated Slack channel facilitates real-time discussion and validation of design components, promoting cohesive design system application.
10. 🛠️ Empathy and Feedback in Developer Tools
- Internal testing is crucial for identifying 'paper cuts' or minor issues, but it may not represent all user experiences. It's essential to test tools externally to ensure they meet diverse needs.
- Developers need to empathize with users by considering various use cases, not just their own working methods. This requires stepping back to understand what would be universally beneficial.
- Feedback is critical; assumptions about how tools should work can be challenged by user feedback, highlighting different processes and needs that were not initially considered.
- Product listening sessions help the team understand diverse workflows and create more empathy with different user processes.
- To gather developer feedback, Figma incorporated a feedback form directly within the product, linked to a Slack channel for real-time team review and discussion.
11. 💬 Engaging with Diverse User Feedback
11.1. Importance of Diverse Feedback
11.2. Balancing Feedback Sources
11.3. Sales Team Insights
11.4. Voice of the Customer Program
11.5. Championing Feedback
11.6. Engaging the Silent Majority
12. 🤔 Balancing Gut Instinct with User Feedback
- Addressing user concerns is critical for reducing daily user frustration and promoting growth.
- Successfully balancing intuition and user feedback involves understanding user emotions and offering immediate solutions to both minor and significant issues.
- Feedback loops involve multiple perspectives, leading to diverse solution options which must align with the broader company vision.
- Gut instincts should be tempered with openness to feedback, even if it challenges initial assumptions, to ensure comprehensive understanding.
- Involving the team in reviewing feedback ensures accountability and prevents valuable insights from being ignored.
- Prototype testing is effective for evaluating idea feasibility and understanding constraints, often speeding up decision-making with quick proof of concepts.
13. 🤝 Collaborative Design and Engineering Process
13.1. Prototyping Speeds Up Decision Making
13.2. Collaborative Design and Engineering
13.3. Challenges in Process Adoption
13.4. Managing Multiple Projects
13.5. Importance of Design Lead
14. 🚀 Post-Launch: Tracking Success and Iterating
- Engineers proactively build dashboards for tracking post-launch metrics, ensuring effective resource utilization.
- Success metrics are defined at project kickoff and refined throughout the lifecycle for accurate post-launch tracking.
- Collaboration with data scientists is key for building effective dashboards and gaining actionable insights.
- Engineering dashboards identify performance issues like slow response or errors for quick resolution.
- Alerts are set up to monitor feature performance and address issues promptly, enabling focus on strategic tasks.
- Product metrics provide insights for future project roadmaps, driven by data and collaboration with data scientists.
- User interaction data is analyzed for usage patterns to inform new projects or validate features.
- Feedback and data are integrated into daily rituals for continuous monitoring and iterative improvement.
- Planning for Version 2 (V2) of features post-launch allows time for features to mature before enhancements.
- A dedicated engineer is assigned weekly for bug fixes, ensuring quick resolution and maintaining customer satisfaction.
15. 📝 Key Learnings and Conclusion
- Identify and address 'paper cuts' in your design process to enhance user experience.
- Understand the primary challenges users face to tailor solutions effectively.
- Implement a feature flag program to test features with real user feedback.
- Utilize multiple feedback channels, including forums, social media, and Slack integrations, to gather comprehensive user insights.
- Combine diverse feedback signals to develop high-quality products.