6 ms·

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 ke

by iTokio 1y ago

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.

tiffanyh 1y ago
Network effects create strong moats. Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
nvr219 1y ago
Great analysis.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  And this all only kind of reads like an ad.
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    Glad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.
    - knuckleheads 1y ago
      "Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"
      - darkwater 1y ago
        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.
- adastra22 1y ago
  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.
  - samsolomon 1y ago
    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.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    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?
    - adastra22 1y ago
      It is illegal to knowingly do this.
  - rhubarbtree 1y ago
    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.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      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.
  - arathis 1y ago
    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.
arrty88 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rafram 1y ago
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.
- dleeftink 1y ago
  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.
- esskay 1y ago
  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.
- mitemte 1y ago
  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.
  - Lalabadie 1y ago
    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.
- sourabhsss 1y ago
  I agree with you. Even with their app on Mac M2 Air, it keeps freezing for me.
- figmasupport01 1y ago
  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=360001731233 https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=...
rramon 1y ago
>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.
- wordofx 1y ago
  Is notion still being developed? Seems to have stagnated and feels like there’s 0 investment now. It’s getting slow and buggy.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    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.
    - wordofx 1y ago
      Searching is buggy. Their api is buggy. Commenting sometimes fails in chrome.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        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.
pjmlp 1y ago
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.
- jnsie 1y ago
  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.
  - cherrybajan 1y ago
    +1. I still use Balsamiq. Their pricing is also very helpful.
  - anonymous344 1y ago
    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..
seanwilson 1y ago
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.
- silvestrov 1y ago
  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.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
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.
- xucian 1y ago
  accurate
- bodhi_mind 1y ago
  From my limited use of figma, everything starts from a template. I think this is a core part of adoption.
robenkleene 1y ago
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&sort=0&page=15&slug=back-to-the-mac-os-x-107-lion-review 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.)
- criley2 1y ago
  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.
gdubs 1y ago
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.
- OldfieldFund 1y ago
  And also it's soooo much smoother than native Adobe tools, even though it runs in the browser.
  - gdubs 1y ago
    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.
belter 1y ago
If its used everywhere already, where is the grow going to come from?
lenkite 1y ago
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!

by iTokio 1y ago

tiffanyh 1y ago

Network effects create strong moats. Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…

nvr219 1y ago

Great analysis.

SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
And this all only kind of reads like an ad.
- worthless-trash 1y ago
  Glad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.
  - knuckleheads 1y ago
    "Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"
    - darkwater 1y ago
      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.
adastra22 1y ago
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.
- samsolomon 1y ago
  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.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  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?
  - adastra22 1y ago
    It is illegal to knowingly do this.
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  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.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    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.
- arathis 1y ago
  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.

arrty88 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

rafram 1y ago

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.

dleeftink 1y ago
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.
esskay 1y ago
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.
mitemte 1y ago
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.
- Lalabadie 1y ago
  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.
sourabhsss 1y ago
I agree with you. Even with their app on Mac M2 Air, it keeps freezing for me.
figmasupport01 1y ago
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=360001731233 https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=...

rramon 1y ago

>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.

wordofx 1y ago
Is notion still being developed? Seems to have stagnated and feels like there’s 0 investment now. It’s getting slow and buggy.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  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.
  - wordofx 1y ago
    Searching is buggy. Their api is buggy. Commenting sometimes fails in chrome.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      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.

pjmlp 1y ago

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.

jnsie 1y ago
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.
- cherrybajan 1y ago
  +1. I still use Balsamiq. Their pricing is also very helpful.
- anonymous344 1y ago
  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..

seanwilson 1y ago

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.

silvestrov 1y ago
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.

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

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.

xucian 1y ago
accurate
bodhi_mind 1y ago
From my limited use of figma, everything starts from a template. I think this is a core part of adoption.

robenkleene 1y ago

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&sort=0&page=15&slug=back-to-the-mac-os-x-107-lion-review 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.)

criley2 1y ago
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.

gdubs 1y ago

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.

OldfieldFund 1y ago
And also it's soooo much smoother than native Adobe tools, even though it runs in the browser.
- gdubs 1y ago
  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.

belter 1y ago

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

lenkite 1y ago

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!