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Comment by iTokio | Hacker News Reader

That’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers.

I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.

Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.

…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.

Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.

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I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.

The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.

The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.

> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.

I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.

For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).

For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).

I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.

It is a real failure of Adobe management that Adobe didn't make Figma but kept doing the native old klunky apps.

The failure started with the Adobe Acrobat being such a dog slow app and never being fixed. Adobe looked too much at market share and forgot to be a tech company, so every platform now has their own PDF reader instead of using Acrobat Reader.

100% agree. People want, above all else, convenience. Whichever tool gets the job done with the least amount of friction for the end user will generally win. People don't want to mess around learning a program, they just want to get the idea that is in their head out into reality as quick as possible. The more friction there is, the more likely the idea is to die before it's realised.

It's like the old story about Steve Jobs. He asked a bunch of engineers to make him a printing application. So they scoured the printer manuals and made this app that implemented every feature possible and took it to Jobs. He instantly dismissed it as being way too complicated, went over to the whiteboard, drew a box with a button, and said something like "You drag the file you want to print on to the box and then click the print button."

Heard the same story, but it was about cd burning, not printing.

You're correct, I misremembered it!

> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files

As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.

And you noted it well - I seem not to care if it is a web app if it works well: Figma, VSCode (Performance as a feature)

> As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.

You'd lose things like shared components within and between files/libraries, interactive prototypes, shared design-tokens/variables, and responsive layout features, which is huge if your team are all-in with UI design system stuff. If you're mostly doing mockups, coding them, then copy/pasting old mockups to create new ones without using an extensive component system, SVG export is more bearable.

For UI work, it's much harder to be productive in a regular SVG editor like Inkscape though compared to something like Penpot.

Exporting it, and exporting it fully editable are two very different expectations here.

Design is a unique creative field when compared to most others, because with design you're not actually creating the final asset, it's more like you're creating a picture of the final asset that someone else needs to create.

E.g., take Blender, Adobe Premiere, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, in all of those cases, what you export is the actual real asset (it's the movie, the drawing, the song, etc...).

It's not like that with design and it ends up pushing design apps away from native apps and towards web apps, because at some point someone, usually an engineer has to get in there and figure out all the details of how this actually needs to get built. So if the app only runs on a Mac that's annoying. But that's not an issue with say, Final Cut Pro, where the person editing the movie can just export the movie themselves, they don't need to involve someone that's maybe using a platform that Final Cut Pro doesn't run on.

Hmm, feels more related to how big the imported assets and final exports are, and how fast + accurate previews are, rather than who does the export? If I'm dealing with GB size videos and image files, local is going to have performance and storage cost advantages so that's why local makes more sense for e.g. movie editors and high-end photoshop work? A lot of terminal based development work could be done via a web app without a problem for example with the big plus of sidestepping complex local dev setup but it becomes less attractive when real-time graphics are involved.

Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.

There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?

Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.

So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.

> There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?

Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.

Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...

In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.

It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.

> I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about

Canva (which is a tool ACTUAL non-tech people care about) proved that years ago

Figma treated responsiveness and framerate as a key part of the experience, because of this approach even though it’s webtech it has much higher performance than Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD etc. so in a sense it embodies what native represents to people better than some literally native but poorly made software.

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.

> I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.

I, for one, prefer web apps for almost everything. The less I have installed on my computer, the better. Exceptions are for really critical stuff like my text editor. Personally, if I was someone who actually used Figma, I'd prefer that to be a native app, too.

For almost everything else-- anything I only use lightly-- I want to keep that crap off of my machine.

> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.

Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.

> For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them.

Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).

This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).

There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.

> Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side

Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?

Personally I think comparing media editing apps to games is a bit of a fallacy because their goals and programming practices are so different. There's an 18 part series from ProVideo Coalition that's about this subject through the lens of After Effects https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...

E.g., this one https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...

Yes, Sketch's failure was to focus on being Mac only.

It may be than in US, and countries of similar income levels, all designers carry Apple gear around, however 70% of the world does not.

Before Figma, we were using a mix of InVision, Adobe XD or Balsamiq.

I love Balsamiq and it was great to see it mentioned here. While the wireframes are intentionally simple looking, the ease of creating a mockup is unsurpassed IMHO.

+1. I still use Balsamiq. Their pricing is also very helpful.

balsaqmiq was nice many many years ago, but then i found pingendo. Used it heavily, but it was buggy and short lived... web frameworks moved on and they abandoned the project very soon.. have to say that my customers never seem to understand the mockups created with balsamiq..

Figma? Fast and snappy?

It runs impressively well for a web app, but I still get multi-second freezes all the time on high-end hardware.

I don't have first-hand Figma experience, but Adobe products aren't free from lag and freezing issues either; there's a large hardware and software surface to support that comes with its own set of issues.

Cant say I've ever experienced that, been using it several years on a range of hardware types (all mac based). The UI freezing would be something local, it's not literally running every action through a 3rd party server.

Figma was quick until a 12-18 months ago, it’s been getting progressively worse. It’s excruciatingly slow at times now. The version history feature takes forever to load. It’s a shame, at one point it was, in my opinion, the best execution of a web app, having avoided all of the issues that other web apps suffer from.

That's my feeling as well. I don't think I've started using (more) complex layers or effects, yet the same files started to seem taxing when open.

I agree with you. Even with their app on Mac M2 Air, it keeps freezing for me.

Hey there, our Figma support team would love to help dig into what might be causing this. If you’re up for it, you can reach out to them directly by filling out this form: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=...

I always thought one of the things that made Figma successful was that it was multiplayer from day one.

A lot of apps start as single player and then try and bolt the multiplayer experience on later.

But Figma was designed around collaboration.

I actually think this was more crucial than whether it was web or native.

And also it's soooo much smoother than native Adobe tools, even though it runs in the browser.

I'm a big proponent of native apps — but credit where it's due, Figma is just one of the slickest web apps. The performance is amazing, and it really never feels like it suffers from being in browser.

>I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.

In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.

Is notion still being developed? Seems to have stagnated and feels like there’s 0 investment now. It’s getting slow and buggy.

I think so? There are some small changes here and there, new integrations are added as they go.

They are not getting investments anymore AFAIK, but they're profitable because of the paying users.

I don't think you have to add X features every hour to stay relevant. The software is pretty powerful at this state already, and I might be discovered 15% of its capabilities probably, despite using it relatively heavily.

Searching is buggy. Their api is buggy. Commenting sometimes fails in chrome.

I don't use their API, but the search works for my scenarios. I'm not an heavy commenter, but it never failed in their app (which is supposedly Electron based) and Firefox for me.

Did you open tickets for these? Some Notion developers frequent here I believe, maybe you can reach them if they provide contact information?

I always found it beneficial to reach-out to provider/developer. The results were not positive all the time, but at least I managed to add an entry to their bug tracker, and the problems are solved 99% of the time, after some time.

Being actively developed is usually the #1 reason apps/services become slow and buggy. You are not introducing bugs by not touching at the code.

I've stopped using it years ago, Figma as well. First I went down the Zettelkasten/Obsidian rabbithole but ended up just using Apple notes. I've ditched Figma too because I was faster with code using design systems and UI components.

Flat design removed the technical barrier of entry for design, which made a design move away from a difficult-to-use app (a la the Adobe Creative Suite) and towards something like an office suite app (Figma is more similar to Google Slides than Adobe Photoshop). And office suite apps were already popular as web apps (e.g., Google Docs) before Figma.

> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.

This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)

(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)

I'm not sure I agree that flat design removed the technical barrier to entry. First off, not everything is flat. Second, and I think this is really important, the ability to deliver a beautiful design system and the ability to use a design system to create a nice UX are two fundamentally different skills. The artist that delivers the most beautiful gradient (which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved) often is not an expert at how best to deliver iOS UI.

And your resident mobile designer who knows everything about iOS and Android probably isn't the best at rolling brand new design systems with or without really pretty gradients.

Because these are two different skills, I don't think the style of the design system really impacts the barrier of entry. Most UI designers aren't fiddling with the finer details like that. They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.

I think your mainly indexing on the word I used "technical", because yes I agree I'd also categorize creating a design system as "technical". But it's technical in a different way than say, creating a glass material in a 3D modeling program, or simulating 3D effects in a 2D image-editing program. So I mean the way the latter is technical, not the former, if there's a better word than technical to use here, I'm all ears (maybe "skilled"?).

The key difference in the specific context of Figma is that a layman without any technical skills can give pretty good feedback on a design system, but say, wouldn't be able to give good feedback on how a 3D modeling material is constructed.

> which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved

This isn't what I mean, I meant combining layers to create 3D effects like this https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kj9yut/guide_to... i.e., creating the gradient itself isn't complicated, it's composing layers to achieve a specific effect that's complicated (and "technical").

I guess I didn't really address the split in roles you mentioned which is accurate, but I think flat design is what facilitated (and makes possible) that split.

E.g., you couldn't do this with the type of design I was doing in the 2000s, because the assets we were making didn't scale and recontexualize as easily as flat design elements. I.e., I think flat design not only paved the way for Figma, but also design systems in general.

> They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.

Well, with an established competitor like Sketch, you can laugh your way to the bank. SO many users pleaded their first born children to Sketch if they could have cross platform support, web-view support, real time collab, commenting system, cloud support, buit-in Developer handoff, nested components, auto-layouts - even just one of the above.

Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.

When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!

I honestly think the main thing driving their adoption is that you don't need to _learn_ anything to use it. For 90% of use-cases, the UI is as simple as the iOS photo editing app. It's a familiar experience from the moment you open the app.

Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.

accurate

From my limited use of figma, everything starts from a template. I think this is a core part of adoption.

Network effects create strong moats.

Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…

If its used everywhere already, where is the grow going to come from?

Great analysis.

And this all only kind of reads like an ad.

Glad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.

"Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"

Well, I've asked ChatGPT with your prompt and came out with a very long comment. Asking to shorten it, we get:

"Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around.

Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast.

That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it."

In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.

It’s a terrible analysis that ignores that LLMs destroy most of the value proposition of Figma, and this is a last chance to find a bigger bag holder.

Just, Devil's Advocate, but..

I mean..

you can create a lot of wealth for yourself by finding the bigger fool so to speak. And arguably, that's what a lot of tech IPOs are in any case, so why single out Figma for engaging in the practice?

It is illegal to knowingly do this.

Looking forward to seeing an LLM that can produce good design. Figma is working on this themselves, they have the distribution, so even it came to pass why wouldn’t they own the market? They have the data and the resources to buy more.

That’s not what I mean. Designers can work with any tool to produce a design, and then Claude or Gemini or whatever are quite capable of turning that design into working React code or HTML or whatever.

I mean in the future there are probably no PMs, Designers or Engineers. All those roles are going to converge. There will be a bunch of people that build and manage the software that creates software.

Hi. Ran a design studio. Used Figma religiously. Having now moved in-house, I’m leaning way more on llms and prototyping.

I don’t think Figma goes way, but I do see it receding.

On the contrary, Figma's value proposition is increased by LLMs. Current coding assistants are like savant-idiot junior devs: They have relatively low reasoning capabilities, way too much courage, lack taste and need to be micromanaged to be successful.

But they can be successful if you spell out the exact specifications. And what is Figma if not an exact specification of the design you want? Within a couple of years the Frontend Developer Market might crash pretty hard.

Plus, their designs can scaffold easily to both web and native thanks to React framework. One day, you might be able to speak to figma AI, describe the UI, and the FigAI draws the flow/interface for you and then ships the bones of the app. Perhaps they will sprinkle in a backend too.

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