Figma failed me

And how I dealt with itFigma failed me and how I dealt with itI’ve been an avid Figma user since I first crossed paths with it years ago. Ever since, it is like the home for me to design from. But recently I’ve had more and more instances where Figma just didn’t feel … right.During my studies, when I first started prototyping user interfaces I first dove Axure RP. Exciting to make my first step to designing digital products, it felt like a new world was opening up before my eyes. As an all-digital nerd I had always wanted to work with interfaces, and now the time had come.However, I quickly realized that Axure was in fact not the ideal solution for the project at hand. The project at the time was a IOT product-service combination which had to be prototyped. I remember having Bluetooth as an integral part of the exact interaction that we were going to test around campus. Accepting that I was going to have to test a lesser version of the designed user experience felt like missing something in my arsenal.About a year later I got introduced to Protopie, another more high-fidelity prototyping tool that was able to integrate real Bluetooth interactions into your prototypes. This exact product would have saved me the year prior.It is not uncommon for me to face a wall while prototyping ideas and conversations. So far, the traditional pen and paper have helped me much further than I can imagine. It does, however, leave a lot of room for personal interpretation.With more complex digital platforms (smart goggles, EV dashboards, AI-products) in upcoming products I am beginning to see this problem more and more. As our digital systems, which serve our user experiences, are beginning to become more complex, so do the interactions that we design our experiences with.How do we prototype complex digital interactions?That raises a personal question that I haven’t quite been able to solve — How do we prototype and communicate complex UX interactions through traditional methods? And do we need to revert back to more primitive methods?On a more personal note, I am working on a design research tool that leverages AI to understand user interviews at scale. To add to the complexity of the project, the whole things is built on top of a collaborative whiteboard.This leaves Figma to become great for things like — Where does the toolbar go? What shadows do I use? What does following another user look like? But it leaves a lot of the core product to be left open for interpretation. This makes for a very hard design process, making actual experience design impossible.I think Leapfrog is a great example on where traditional tools, like Axure, ProtoPie and Figma would have all failed me. There would be little room for explaining my intention for the product with these tools.Understanding user needs through drafting principlesHaving discussions with interested people from my Leapfrog mailing lists did help me to get an idea on what customers were expecting. During these interviews I talked about principles with which to design AI into the product and what they thought was going to help them do better research.Bringing these principles with me did help me shape my thinking in a way,  » Read More