Hacker News Reader

Comment by noen | Hacker News Reader

Design is communication.

I loved sketch and was a devout user for years.

But with Sketch, I can only communicate with a very small set of people. It required a plethora of other tools and services to share, get feedback, or insights on my work.

The tool is only as effective as the reach of its creation. If technology has shown us anything in this generation, it is that reach and collaboration are immensely more valuable than tools themselves.

I've watched our company move from Sketch to Figma. The crappy performance is a relatively small price to pay in exchange for inclusive design.

My hope is that eventually Figma will launch platform native apps for MacOS and Windows, because I have zero hope that Sketch is ever going to figure out that they've been driving on the road to irrelevance for the past several years.

View on HN

> Design is communication.

I assume it’s unintentional, but the rest of your comment twists the original meaning of the maxim[0]. In my experience, “design is communication” generally means a slightly less obvious thing: how through the medium of your design you communicate with the end user.

Your points about the importance of communication between designers are valid, but by using that maxim you make it sound like all design is done in teams, which isn’t fair—a single person can design a great product (and need none of the collaboration tools), if they do indeed understand their users well.

[0] Here’s a lovely article: https://jnd.org/design_as_communication/

what an amazing comment and article, thanks for sharing

Agree. But one thing to note is that many of the communication tools and features built into tools like figma or Adobe xd are not just for communication among designers but communication between designers and developers and even other stakeholders like clients and project managers.

This entire post can be summed up as "I haven't used Sketch for a long time and had therefore completely missed the introduction of Sketch.cloud"

Sketch Cloud seems very similar to Zeplin, which still has limits to collaboration compared to Figma.

Also, the focus still seems to be on the Mac app, everything goes through that. That's still a big hurdle when it comes to collaboration.

Not the point.

What is the point is that Sketch didn't have the functionality they needed at the time they needed it, so they migrated to Figma.

This is exactly why almost nobody writes native apps anymore. You're restricted to only one platform, which limits your ability to collaborate with anyone not using that platform.

Asking someone to actually install an app is also itself a huge barrier.

Installation of native apps on desktop is a nightmare requiring at least two or three steps, which is unforgivable to most users in 2020 for anything approaching consumer or collaboration software. For that kind of software anything with more than one step in 2020 is broken and unusable. Nobody is going to jump through hoops just to view a proposal or something.

Mobile OSes made this somewhat better, but not much. App stores are slow, hard to search, and a nightmare for developers which discourages things from being written for them. Users also dislike installing mobile apps now as they assume, usually correctly, that any mobile app is so riddled with spyware it's borderline malware. Each install is yet another thing that's likely to be sucking your contacts, spying on your clipboard, tracking your phone usage, and sending your location to ten different adware monetization platforms.

Nothing compares to the ease of entering or clicking a URL and bam you're there.

They’ve literally stated that Sketch app has live collaboration coming

I think they need at least a live Web preview too, and cover all of Figma‘s other functionality.

They do. Sketch Cloud has live web preview, developer handoff, basic prototyping, version control and more. It’s not as fully featured as standalone alternatives, but it’s free and works well.

Agreed although it's not free, it's $79 per year.

I think OP was referring to cross-platform support and being able to work with people who don't have a Mac, unless I am misunderstanding.

This is what users have been saying since the dawn of time. Developers don't get it, they think everybody is using their platform and their software is so much better, so it must beat out the problems of multiplatform software.

Reality is if your average user can't click and install, very few are going to use your GUI software. They don't care how it's made. This is the great divide between engineer and user that's examples every day here on HN.

There is a Zeplin plugin for Sketch which works pretty well https://zeplin.io/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com