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> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encode

> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data. Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their training data" until you have seen the whole pipeline with your own eyes. Sophisticated people sort of know Adobe's claims are bullshit, but what exactly do you expect the community to do, speculate on the exactly zero evidence Adobe has shown of how any of their stuff works? Anyway, I am pretty sure Adobe is delighted they are not paying $20b for something that is worth way, way less. Like maybe $500m at most. Meanwhile the people using Figma at many companies are getting laid off. Etsy, Bytedance, Unity Spotify, Salesforce all made massive UX designer cuts. The real question is, is the thing people are using Figma for even worth $20b? No, no way. Figma users work in the Making Bugs department: they make new buggy things nobody asked for, that aren't lists or spreadsheets but should just be lists and spreadsheets, which makes everything worse. There is nowadays positive ROI to doing less Figmaing. In my opinion there has always been more ROI to doing less Figmaing, to straight up not having those people around and not gathering so many opinions on designing lists from so many stakeholders. That holistic experience is expensive in many ways, and while again you can be successful delivering that, it doesn't mean it makes sense. Just look at the Spotify app. It's a hot abject mess of absolute garbage UI. They have been diehard Figma users for years. They are the prime example of Figmafication ruining something extremely simple. It's fucking lists! Lists are not worth $20b.

zombiwoof 3y ago
nailed it
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.
aliston 3y ago
What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me... As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  This is a stylized comment. It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for. Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff. Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI. > why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!
parentheses 3y ago
I think this shows that you don't fully understand UI/UX and its importance/role in modern software creation. Moreover, you're conflating your opinions about Spotify with an industry. This would explain what I consider to be an mis assessment of the situation. As someone close to UX my entire life, Figma is a well positioned and useful app that has no decent substitute on the Adobe side. It has market share and potentially a huge data moat giving them a leg up on the "AI Designer" problem. Now more than ever, it is worth a lot.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
patternMachine 3y ago
Remarkably ignorant comment, and bitter too. You might as well blame MS Word for all the poorly written books out there.
- fuck_google 3y ago
  [dead]
obmelvin 3y ago
The lowest estimate I see for Figma's ARR is $200m, so to suggest that even $500m is a high valuation is just untethered from the facts
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  Yes, but Adobe was going to buy them at 100x revenue. Thats quite insane.
  - obmelvin 3y ago
    I never questioned that 20B was high. It's also important to keep in mind that Adobe has failed for years with xD - so the value to them is quite different than it would be to almost any other purchaser The poster clearly has an axe to grind with Figma and anyone who is involved with UX decisions at most companies. Being mad at Spotify doesn't mean Figma is worth around 1 years of ARR (assuming they met their 2023 growth)
tragicfootball 3y ago
I agree the problems you've mentioned here, but I don't think it's because of Figma or any tooling. It's How Capitalism Works™
wildpeaks 3y ago
You might be confusing it with something else: Figma is merely for prototyping and designing, it's not the application that is shipped to end users (so it's like blaming the bugs of an app on its photoshop mockup).

zombiwoof 3y ago

nailed it

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.

aliston 3y ago

What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me... As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?

doctorpangloss 3y ago
This is a stylized comment. It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for. Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff. Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI. > why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!

parentheses 3y ago

I think this shows that you don't fully understand UI/UX and its importance/role in modern software creation. Moreover, you're conflating your opinions about Spotify with an industry. This would explain what I consider to be an mis assessment of the situation. As someone close to UX my entire life, Figma is a well positioned and useful app that has no decent substitute on the Adobe side. It has market share and potentially a huge data moat giving them a leg up on the "AI Designer" problem. Now more than ever, it is worth a lot.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

patternMachine 3y ago

Remarkably ignorant comment, and bitter too. You might as well blame MS Word for all the poorly written books out there.

fuck_google 3y ago
[dead]

obmelvin 3y ago

The lowest estimate I see for Figma's ARR is $200m, so to suggest that even $500m is a high valuation is just untethered from the facts

IAmGraydon 3y ago
Yes, but Adobe was going to buy them at 100x revenue. Thats quite insane.
- obmelvin 3y ago
  I never questioned that 20B was high. It's also important to keep in mind that Adobe has failed for years with xD - so the value to them is quite different than it would be to almost any other purchaser The poster clearly has an axe to grind with Figma and anyone who is involved with UX decisions at most companies. Being mad at Spotify doesn't mean Figma is worth around 1 years of ARR (assuming they met their 2023 growth)

tragicfootball 3y ago

I agree the problems you've mentioned here, but I don't think it's because of Figma or any tooling. It's How Capitalism Works™

wildpeaks 3y ago

You might be confusing it with something else: Figma is merely for prototyping and designing, it's not the application that is shipped to end users (so it's like blaming the bugs of an app on its photoshop mockup).