Figma of your imagination
Cutting edge collaboration tools
All software expands until it includes messaging - Tech Twitter
I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought to this Benedict Evans essay for the past week. The main thrust of the article is that COVID is tossing us into a great era of forced experiments: Will we buy groceries online? Can we educate university students online? Certainly those are trillion dollar questions that we as society need to solve. What interested me more was the implications of a comment about Zoom and workflows.
As anyone following the tech news is familiar, video chat is exploding. Video is the Swiss Army knife of software tools currently. Meetings, social events, dates, exercise classes and so on are all trying to adapt to Zoom. An interesting question raised by the article is which actions in work truly need video/chat and which use cases could be better served by alternative means. Said differently: where is Zoom good enough and where do we need specific new software? If we are going to rip up how we work as a society, is a shared screen and video the best path forward? Maybe Zoom fatigue is a sign we need alternative tools.
One recent example that illustrates this is Figma.
Figma background
Unless you are in the design community, you are unlikely to know much of Figma. Design is not my specialty either, but I would describe the concept as “Adobe Photoshop meets Google Docs”. (Technically it would compete against Adobe XD). Photoshop because the core utility is around design. Google Docs because the differentiation is the ability to collaborate seamlessly. Despite Adobe Photoshop/XD, Sketch, Abstract and a host of other tools in the design arena, Figma is in talks to raise money at a $2 billion valuation. During COVID. With a $165 billion public competitor in Adobe.
Giving them credit, they’ve done many things right.
Browser-native software
Speedy and responsive
A platform for integrations and templates
Some design advances I’m not qualified to comment on
These are impressive, though I am hard pressed to argue Adobe couldn’t adopt the best portions. The core to their success still appears to be the collaboration embedded into the experience. By all accounts, Figma feels like a tool designed from the ground up to enable efficient collaboration between teammates. It turns out there is a huge market demand for enabling workers to collaborate more effectively. Particularly with the lockdowns, business processes need to be resilient to a lack of face-time.
Evolving workflows
Benedict’s example was a company dashboard. In the old days, a business analyst would prepare a dashboard of metrics, format them as slides, and email around. With the ability to host files in the cloud, there was no need for email. The document could live at a specific address. The full expression of this was a Tableau dashboard: the metrics are connected to your data, automatically update, and end users can apply filters to see the data they need. Hosting a screenshot of the Powerpoint slide the analyst used to make, while technologically feasible, is an old process applied in an incorrect way.
Walking through a concrete example for Figma. Let’s imagine a new designer receiving team feedback a weekly meeting.
Expired: Email: “Can you move that pixel in the upper right down a little bit?” Slow, cumbersome, borderline annoying.
Tired: Pointing at the issue with your mouse over a shared zoom. Collaborative but in a forced, limited way.
Wired: Highlighting the area in a shared collaboration space. Remote collaboration as if you were in the same room.
From this view, it seems likely that much usage of Zoom is in fact a temporary stepping stone to a new wave of tools with collaboration native to the platform. We all hate email, and we are all fatiguing of spending hours in front of Zoom. How can I be enabled to work well with others, more efficiently than before, but in a more native experience than sharing a screen in Zoom?
Upon further inspection, we see this trend brewing across the board
Emailing spreadsheets and docs -> Office365/Google Docs
Adobe Photoshop and your neighbor -> Figma collaboration
Back and forth redlining of legal contracts -> Docusign
Whiteboarding in person -> MIRO
Developing internal wikis during a meeting -> Notion
Live video updates -> LOOM
Why do we need Slack and Zoom then?
Figma’s success isn’t to say we should cut the Zoom licenses from our design team. The point is that while some activities will demand video (manager 1:1s, team staff meetings) and some issues work best over some form of chat (quick questions, not tied to a specific item of work), this great work from home experiment seems likely to build a new breed of tools designed from the bottoms up for collaboration.
In a rough hierarchy
Is this tied to a specific piece of work? Collaborate in tool
Is this a lightweight question, asynchronous, and not tied to a specific piece of work? Collaborate in chat/email/SMS
Is this a heavyweight question? Is the decision uncertain and emotionally/politically charged? Does the core value of the action involve developing human connection? Video or in-person
Given the seismic shifts occurring, I would argue this is less bearish for Slack and Zoom than additive.