Figma - Deep Dive: Designing Figma Slides (project walkthrough)
The discussion revolves around the development of a tone dial for Figma Slides, aimed at improving text manipulation through AI. The project was driven by the need to provide users with more control over the tone of their presentations, allowing them to select from a matrix of tones intersected by axes of professional-casual and concise-expanded. The final design included a dial UI accessible via the properties panel, with presets for common presentation tones like executive, basic, technical, and educational. The design process involved multiple iterations and critiques, focusing on making the interface intuitive and fidgetable. The team also explored various visual elements, such as shadows, to enhance the dial's tactile feel. The project emphasized user-friendly design while maintaining the flexibility to interact with AI for more customized text manipulation.
Key Points:
- The tone dial allows users to manipulate text tone in Figma Slides, offering control over professional-casual and concise-expanded axes.
- Presets for common tones like executive, basic, technical, and educational are included to aid presentation creation.
- The design process was iterative, focusing on user-friendly and fidgetable interfaces, with critiques guiding improvements.
- Visual elements like shadows were used to enhance the dial's tactile feel, making it more engaging for users.
- The project aimed to balance novelty with familiarity, ensuring users could easily access and use the tone dial.
Details:
1. 🎨 Prototyping and Iterative Design: A Creative Journey
- The project was highly prototype-driven, emphasizing early and continuous iteration.
- Initial designs focused on structured grids with playful elements like shadows to enhance visual appeal.
- AI design tools for Figma slides were developed, focusing on text manipulation as a key feature.
- Text manipulation was identified as the most anticipated AI feature, crucial for storytelling enhancements.
- Current AI tools are limited to complete text prompting or basic adjustments; the project aims to evolve this.
- The goal was to create a novel, interactive text manipulation tool for better storytelling control.
- Inspiration was drawn from innovative companies, emphasizing novel interactions and user engagement.
- Design principles included making the tool 'fidgetable,' allowing quick exploration and mistake-making.
2. 🚀 From Concept to Completion: Delivering the Final Product
- The final product shipped included a tone dial feature accessible via the properties panel for text nodes.
- The tone dial UI is a matrix of tones intersected by two axes: professional-casual and concise-expanded.
- Four core presets were developed for specific use cases: Executive (concise and professional), Basic (short and casual), Technical (domain expertise and professional), and Educational (expanded and approachable).
- These presets were designed to align with common presentation needs, enhancing ease of use and accessibility.
- The design process included creating prototypes to demonstrate the adjustability of these tone presets.
- The implementation of the tone dial feature was driven by user feedback, which highlighted the need for customizable communication tones across different contexts.
- User testing showed a 30% increase in user satisfaction due to the ease of adjusting tones according to specific requirements.
- The development process prioritized iterative testing and continuous feedback integration, ensuring the feature met user expectations effectively.
3. 🔄 Navigating Design Challenges: Fidgetability and User Engagement
- The project was highly prototype-driven, emphasizing iterative design based on feedback.
- The initial design challenge was creating a 'fidgetable' interface, visualized as a matrix of tones.
- Early iterations focused on understanding the grid structure, debating between a dot grid, square grid, or clean grid.
- A significant design change involved rotating the grid to make intersecting tones the quadrants, simplifying user understanding.
- Facilitating critiques was essential to gather diverse feedback and iterate on UI design.
- Challenges included deciding how aggressively to map tones on an infinite dial, balancing a freeform interface with structured tone presets.
- Different UI designs were explored, including the use of guiding markers and tooltips to educate users, enhancing user engagement.
- The exploration phase involved experimenting with colors and tooltips to improve user education and engagement.
- Discussions considered whether intersecting tones should be explicit presets or discovered through user interaction.
- The process required balancing simplicity in user experience with the complexity of design blueprints.
4. ⚙️ Overcoming Design Hurdles: Presets and Usability
- The design team iterated quickly on dial design, focusing on clear structure and shadows, but struggled to integrate presets effectively into the experience.
- Initial concepts included visual thumbnails for presets, which were ultimately confusing in the properties panel as they were similar to text styles.
- Exploring embedded presets in the properties panel revealed user feedback favoring a dial-first interaction.
- Several iterations, including hiding presets in long lists or using user interaction to reveal them, were tested but found to be confusing.
- Ultimately, a simple, repeatable design was settled on where the dial is primary, with accessible yet unobtrusive presets, effectively balancing usability and functionality.
5. 🖌️ Fine-tuning the Experience: Shadows and UI Refinements
- The introduction of a pencil icon with an AI magic sprinkle signifies AI usage in presets, providing an intuitive entry point for accessing the full rewrite feature capabilities.
- The rewrite feature leverages a large language model (LLM) to perform a variety of rewrites, such as rhymes and tone changes, enhancing user engagement and offering more flexibility.
- Initial feedback indicated that users found presets limiting, prompting improvements to make full LLM capabilities more accessible.
- A recent update, rolled out over 10 days, introduced significant UI improvements and new features in Figma slides, enhancing overall user experience.
- The tone dial feature now supports multiple languages, including Japanese, Indonesian, and Spanish, allowing effective tone adjustments in these languages.
- An easy, quick entry point for users to prompt themselves for different copy options was added, improving usability and customization options.
6. 🎬 Reflective Insights and Future Directions
- Design enhancements focused on adding depth and a tactile feel through shadows, even if not always noticeable to users, resulting in a more lifelike and engaging interface.
- Collaboration with engineers who have strong design acumen was emphasized, allowing for iterative design improvements and a final product that satisfies both designers and engineers.
- The iterative design process involved multiple rounds of adjustments and feedback, highlighting the importance of collaboration and refinement in achieving the desired aesthetic outcome.
- The design QA process revealed that shadow effects in dark mode significantly improved visual appeal, demonstrating the impact of attention to detail in user interface design.
- Personal satisfaction and passion for design intricacies were conveyed, underscoring the value of craftsmanship and aesthetic detail in product development.