Figma and the forces of change

What does it take to convince people to change the way they work?

We’re not only talking about unforeseen and catastrophic events like the pandemic, it’s those once-in-a-while moments that, for one reason or another, force us to take a step back, reevaluate and work out what we can do to “make things better”.

Last year, analyst firm Gartner identified six forces of change it believed would shape service providers until 2025, identifying disruptive trends and business models that all businesses would need to prepare for.

“In ordinary times, savvy customers, well-financed competitors and a rapidly changing technology landscape would provide all of the challenges a technology leader would need,” said Rajesh Kandaswamy, Chief of Research and Gartner Fellow. “However, some forces acting on a provider present a more fundamental threat — anticipate and evolve, or be disrupted.”

So, how does this apply to the design world?

Designers have always been inventors, striving for newer and better ways of doing things. Naturally curious, one of the questions often on the lips of a design leader is - how can we do this better? Or, as Forrester analyst Gina Bhawalkar put it in a blog last year:

“Are we doing the necessary things to maximise our investment so we unlock the business benefits of design?”

At Figma, we’ve talked to a number of customers to find out how they’ve transformed their design process over the past few years, and identified the core reason for the change.

Some of the things design teams were looking to improve included;

• Designer collaboration
• Co-creation and transparency
• Online whiteboarding
• Design systems
• Designer productivity
• Designer speed

Collaboration during the pandemic is one obvious place to start. For instance, at Dropbox, designers found that getting into a flow while remote working required more effort… they needed a new way to collaborate. And they used Figma to do that. As Stan Yeung, product designer, put it, ”Figma has become the centre of our universe since the pandemic, with more communication and collaboration happening within the design files themselves.”

At News UK, that eureka moment was triggered by the company’s expansion as they tried to evolve with their customer base. There were new print, online, radio, and TV services, and for the design team that meant scaling design and development across multiple brands and products. Something needed to change in order for them to have a single design system to organise and manage the process. They migrated to Figma, with the goal of consolidating multiple tools, centralizing library management and, of course, getting their teams to actually use and contribute to the system.

There are countless stories of major brands who have used Figma to solve these problems, and more. And we’ve highlighted a few of them in our new eBook - 10 ways major brands changed the way they design.

Find out how these companies have made their design process faster, more efficient and fun, while keeping everyone on the same page.