Feedback

Figma and FigJam are both great places to hold design reviews and solicit feedback. Depending on your goals for the session, there can be a few key advantages to moving your designs to FigJam.

• Altitude. By bringing your designs into FigJam, you can signal that you’re looking to keep things high level. Whereas in Figma, you might be tempted to design live or move components around in real time, FigJam elevates the conversation to keep things on track.
• Reactions. FigJam has tools like stickies, stickers, and stamps to help you react the same way you might if you were gathered around a whiteboard with your team.
• Cleanliness. When you hold reviews in FigJam, you don’t have to worry about cluttering your primary design file with feedback, doodles, or edits. This way, you can keep Figma as your single source of truth for designs.
• Artifacts. FigJam can easily function as a centralized place for artifacts of the design process, from brainstorming and ideation through feedback and iteration. You can even embed your FigJam files in other documentation tools such as Coda, Notion, and Dropbox Paper.

Much like leading a brainstorming session, the success of a review process often hinges on its structure and format. As a result, the steps are quite similar:

Define your goals

Before you start putting pen to paper, it’s important to know what you want out of the session. Consider the goal of the review, the kind of feedback you want, and the audience you’ll be speaking to (eg. executives, designers, engineers, etc). These factors will all influence how you conduct the review session and the type of materials you will need. For example, if you want to do a review where your team generates new ideas based on their feedback, you might consider building in a whiteboarding space for each person.

Prepare the FigJam file

Next up, you’ll want to get your FigJam file organized and ready for review. You can bring the designs you want critiqued from Figma into FigJam by copying and pasting, and communicate the flow of your screens using FigJam’s connectors.

Using components can help standardize the format in which you collect your feedback and lower the barrier to entry for participants to submit feedback. This also has the added benefit of reducing the impulse for participants to get distracted by things like colors or font size. Alternatively, if you only want certain types of feedback on specific parts of the flow, you might create a custom feedback card component that participants can fill out.

To make a component for FigJam, simply build it in Figma, publish the library, and then add it into the components tab in FigJam. If you build components with auto layout in Figma, they will still resize responsively in FigJam. You can also switch between different variants in FigJam.

You can use a component to populate important background information (as pictured below) or use FigJam’s text and hyperlink features to add descriptions and link out to relevant documentation, prototypes, and design files.

Facilitate the session

Once your feedback session is structured to your liking, it’s time to bring your team into the fold. As a facilitator, you can, again, use FigJam’s built-in timer, audio chat, and cursor chat, to communicate with your team seamlessly. Your participants can leave feedback in any way they want—doodles, stickies, text, stamps, and components are all in play. The pre-built stickers in FigJam can be particularly fun to use when providing feedback or highlighting certain aspects of the work.

Follow up

Before ending the session (or immediately following), it’s important to align on decisions and next steps. This way your team has a clear direction as you continue iterating on your designs in Figma.