A couple of years ago, amidst the boom of new design and prototyping software, I was pretty reluctant to fight on the Figma/Sketch cold war. I was working on a relatively small design team and, after years helping to design products, well sold on the idea that software is not the important bit, instead the people, the processes and the thinking behind what we do is what delivers the good results (which we know end of the day is true… but everything else helps).

几年前，在一片新的设计和原型软件的繁荣 ，我很不愿意在FIGMA / 素描冷战对抗。 我当时只是一个相对较小的设计团队，在多年的产品设计工作后，我广为接受，认为软件不是重要的一环，而工作背后的人员，流程和思想才是可以带来良好结果的想法(我们知道一天结束是正确的……但是其他所有方法都会有所帮助)。

So no, I didn’t want to change Sketch for anything, we had our library and our processes and not only our issues were not going to to be solved by any new piece of software (if anything it would create a whole new project for us to migrate all our designs to a new system), but also I was personally not keen on what Figma was selling. I was pretty sceptical about it.

所以，不，我不想改变素描什么，我们有我们的图书馆和我们的流程，并不仅是我们的问题是不会被任何新的软件来解决(如果有的话，将创造一个全新的项目我们将所有设计迁移到新系统上)，但是我个人并不热衷于Figma销售什么。 我对此非常怀疑。

But why was I so sceptical:

但是为什么我如此怀疑：

• I thought of it as a web service. It didn’t look like the rest of the apps that live in my computer, it had more of a website feel to it, and I perceived it as less stable and reliable because of that. I saw Figma as a more casual piece of software.

  我认为它是一个Web服务 。 它看起来不像我计算机上其余的应用程序，它看起来更像一个网站，因此我认为它的稳定性和可靠性较差。 我把Figma看作是一个比较随意的软件。

• I frowned upon online-only. Most of us are lucky enough to enjoy a permanent decent stable connection (if we ignore for a moment our COVID times) but despite that the idea of working on something complex on the cloud was unfamiliar to me, and me and my team feared that would mean not having access to anything when offline.

  我皱眉只在线 。 我们大多数人都幸运地拥有一个永久的体面稳定连接(如果暂时忽略COVID时间)，但是尽管我对在云上处理复杂的事物的想法并不熟悉，但我和我的团队仍然担心这样做表示离线时无法访问任何内容。

• Sketch had already got me. I was committed to it. You make a tool a core part of your process and your craft, you spend lots of time learning its perks and you’ve got a nice example of how the effort heuristic makes you overvalue something.

  素描已经吸引了我 。 我致力于这一点。 您将工具作为过程和Craft.io的核心部分，花费大量时间来学习其优点，并且有一个很好的例子说明了启发式工作如何使您高估某些东西。

• In-tool collaboration in a small team felt like a nice to have. I didn’t miss the interactivity between us as designers. And if at some point we needed we could always use Abstract to keep better control of our working files. I had never used it but I knew it was there in case we needed it if our team grew.

  在一个小团队中进行工具内协作感觉很不错。 我没有错过我们作为设计师之间的互动性。 而且，如果需要的话，我们总是可以使用Abstract来更好地控制工作文件。 我从未使用过它，但是我知道它在那里，以防我们的团队成长时我们需要它。

My situation changed last year when I got a new role and became part of a much bigger, scaled up design team. I joined in when they were migrating to Figma from Sketch and Abstract. They were doing so for multiple reasons, some of them being the performance problems of Abstract but also seeking a more interconnected system (and probably the design community’s pressure was another trigger there).

去年，当我担任新职务并加入规模更大，规模更大的设计团队时，情况发生了变化。 当他们从Sketch和Abstract迁移到Figma时，我加入了。 他们之所以这样做是出于多种原因，其中一些是Abstract的性能问题，但也正在寻求一个更加互连的系统(可能是设计社区的压力是另一个触发因素)。

So we started to explore and discover how to work with it. Learning it took a matter of hours, pretty easy coming from Sketch and having used other software where the idea of resizable ‘frames’ rather than just groups or artboards was as well present (the prototyping tool Principle, for example). But learning the basics wasn’t where the biggest value laid, there was way more to it.

因此，我们开始探索并发现如何使用它。 学习这花了几个小时，从Sketch上获得了相当容易，并且使用了其他软件，在这些软件中，可调整大小的“框架”(而不只是组或画板)的想法也很普遍(例如，原型工具Principle )。 但是学习基础并不是最大的价值所在，还有更多的途径。

I don’t want to list Figma’s features and talk about how great it is, but instead I would like to mention what it meant to me and the sort of opportunities and challenges it presented me and my peers during the few months I’ve been wielding with this tool:

我不想列出Figma的功能并谈论它的强大之处，但我想提一下它对我的意义以及它在我几个月以来给我和我的同伴带来的机遇和挑战。一直在使用此工具：

设计工具的民主化 (A democratisation of the design tool)

From my honest experience, I’ve rarely seen anyone in any other role (other than designers) open my Sketch files, and when they did I wish they have never done it. These files were mine and only mine, they were a representation of my process and how I wanted to organise things. It was my organised chaos.

从我的诚实经验来看，我很少见过任何其他角色(除了设计师以外)打开我的Sketch文件，而当他们这样做时，我希望他们从未这样做过。 这些 文件是我的，也是我的，它们代表了我的流程以及我如何组织事物。 那是我有组织的混乱。

This changed with Figma. Now everybody had access to our designs and was able to comment and review them, both people with design backgrounds as well as other roles in the company. This made all of us think about how we wanted our work to be seen by others so they could make sense out of it.

这随着Figma改变了。 现在，每个人都可以访问我们的设计，并且能够评论和审阅它们，包括具有设计背景以及公司中其他角色的人员。 这使我们所有人都在思考我们希望别人如何看待我们的工作，以便他们可以理解。

Where and how to direct people to and what to ‘hide’ from the rest of the employees becomes a skill by itself. The same goes with contextualising explorations and outputs. Running testing sessions with other designers on that structure may become a very insightful thing to try, too.

在何处以及如何将人们引导到其他员工以及从其他员工“隐藏”什么本身就成为一种技能。 情境化的探索和输出也是如此。 在该结构上与其他设计师进行测试会议可能也变得很有见识。

复杂的相互联系的生态系统 (A complex interlinked ecosystem)

Everything is connected in Figma, specially since the links feature was released. Rather than files in a folder (within a folder and enclosed in yet another folder), you get a structure that you can interlink and organise at will. This means that if you start a project and it has dependencies in another one, you can link to it. Or that you can refer to specific explorations done on a specific point on one of your artboards and give a quick access to them (yes, you can link to any element of the page). It’s a complex order that you have to own with your team to get the most of it for you, your peers and your organisation.

万物在Figma中已连接，尤其是自发布链接功能以来。 您将获得一个可以随意链接和组织的结构，而不是文件夹中的文件(在一个文件夹中，而在另一个文件夹中)。 这意味着，如果您启动一个项目并且该项目在另一个项目中具有依赖项，则可以链接到该项目。 或者，您可以参考在一个画板上的特定点进行的特定探索，并快速访问它们(是的，您可以链接到页面的任何元素)。 您必须与团队一起拥有一个复杂的订单，才能为您，您的同事和您的组织获得最大的收益。

That means being able to link to other sources or dependencies within the tool, but maybe Figma doesn’t need to be the go-to place to get around the project. Companies rely on other software such as Notion, Confluene and Jira for that. But it can be at least a source of truth for design matters.

这意味着能够链接到工具中的其他源或依赖项，但是也许Figma并不需要成为解决该项目的理想之地。 公司为此依赖其他软件，例如Notion ， Confluene和Jira 。 但这至少可以成为设计问题的真理来源。

您自己的(产品)结构 (Your own (product) structure)

More people getting through the designs of a product within a complex interlinked environment requires guidance. A comprehensive structure that allows employees to find what they’re looking for (without losing themselves on the wrong files or wasting time looking at blue sky explorations) and new joiners to begin to understand the company’s product.

需要更多的人在复杂的互连环境中完成产品设计。 全面的结构使员工能够找到所需的内容(不会迷失在错误的文件上，也不会浪费时间查看蓝天探险)和新加入的员工开始了解公司的产品。

As prompted by other designers within my company, avoiding the Conway’s law was an important bit to bear in mind. Your product architecture is more stable and recognised by employees than the company’s team’s feeble structure.

根据公司内其他设计师的提示，要避免遵守康威定律是一个重要的考虑因素。 与公司团队的脆弱结构相比，您的产品体系结构更稳定并受到员工的认可。

通过设计工具进行测试 (Testing from your design tool)

There’s an obvious benefit to this: not having to pay and rely on other third party software (Marvel, Invision) to upload your prototypes to (and where you usually have to further work on polishing the prototype).

这有一个明显的好处：不必付费并依靠其他第三方软件( Marvel和Invision )将原型上传到(并且通常需要在这些地方进一步完善原型)。

With COVID in the scene, it means having a Figma link you can send out to participants and that helps them set up the interview, easing this way the job of the tester (either yourself or somebody else). A wizard-style introduction.

在场景中使用COVID，这意味着您可以将Figma链接发送给参与者，并帮助他们进行访谈，从而简化测试人员(您自己或其他人)的工作。 向导风格的介绍。

In conclusion, a few months after starting with it we’re till figuring out how to use it. But the social and structural aspect of it makes the challenge more interesting and collaborative.

总之，在开始使用它的几个月后，我们一直在弄清楚如何使用它。 但是它的社会和结构方面使挑战变得更加有趣和协作。

It’s clear that Figma and what it represents came up at a time where design teams had become way bigger and with that a new set of needs emerged. So despite the will to become software agnostic as teams and as individuals, we can’t ignore the structure within the tools we use and how they define our processes and ways of working, enabling us to better navigate new setups.

显然，在设计团队变得越来越庞大并且出现了新的需求集的时候， Figma及其代表的想法就出现了。 因此，尽管有意愿成为与团队和个人无关的软件，但我们不能忽略所使用工具的结构以及它们如何定义我们的流程和工作方式，从而使我们能够更好地浏览新设置。

This is my first post, I’d be very keen to hear feedback from you, reader. I hope I will put some more thoughts together in the future and hopefully not only about tooling but on experiences and thoughts in regards to our craft.

这是我的第一篇文章，我非常希望听到读者的反馈。 我希望我将来能有更多的想法，不仅希望关于工具，而且希望有关于我们Craft.io的经验和想法。