I respectfully disagree with your central thesis - that the soul of design in UX has been lost. What is the soul of design? I would argue that it’s improving the human experience. Graphic design does this by creating beauty, industrial design by creating valued products, UX design does this by improving interfaces.
Reusing common elements across UIs is a good thing. People complain about the “standard” splash page layout, or the stereotypical web-app styling... but Jakob’s Law is real, and users don’t want to learn another damn UI paradigm, they want to use your product to solve their problems. Reuse simplifies learning and so is a massive positive from an end-user perspective, and making the user’s life better is the designers role.
As you’ve noted, Figma is not infinitely flexible. For graphic design this would be a drawback, as novelty is heavily rewarded. But for UX design? Novelty is less important, and correctly communicating how a design should be implemented is much more essential to a user’s experience. And if I need maximum flexibility I can always use another tool.
I’m not claiming everything is perfect in Figma or the industry - but I think the doom is overstated.
Yes, this is emotional topic for me. If I run sentiment analysis on my reaction the answer will be clear.
What I mean by the soul of design?
This will be long and please skip my point of view if you find it offensive in any way. This is not my goal.
In my view, created from practice in multiple roles there is clearly several types of problems.
1. Cultural Problem - Design is complex field, it requires clear distinction from art, because in the core of design process is functional need of solving real problems with added aesthetics and emotional identification/impact (respectfully to given scope, audience and case). There is no simple way to explain design profession, but in peoples minds programming is magic - design is decoration.
Actually to be a good designer you have to learn marketing, psychology and business processes, if you have to solve problems you must have knowledge of all the problems. Then comes implementation and you have army of technical people who are looking on you like a child, because they think they are smarter,:) Which is a joke in 80% of the time, and actually is my emotional motivation to become one - to check how smart are they actually.
With time I have seen the true - only 20% (generalisation, not actual data) of any given field are true professionals with actual drive, they are moving with them all the rest of the heard.
2. Money Problem - Designers are cheap, because they have been undervalued for years. And this is not new, before Internet boom, advertising agencies made all they possibly can designers to be second grade citizens. How? By creating public perception that design is only aesthetics and everyone can be a designer. This objectively is a lie. Everyone can be an artist, to be a designer you must have scientific mind and use data to make decision in every step of the process and then have aesthetic knowledge and broad culture to create emotional impact. I solved this problem first by creating my own Advertising Agency and when Internet come along I transformed the company to Agency for User Oriented Design and Web - based solutions. Working and solving actual business problems with real customer data I now have a clear picture what is business value of design decisions. Professional design is capable of direct Return of investment, actually in today's world of frameworks and compartmentalisation of programming and cloud services, design is directly the tool that can make a difference and generate revenue. Programming is cheaper in production than successful design.
3. Investors Problem. Investors are given the power to decide who is "the rock-star". They give tons of money to technical founders with an idea. No business experience, no proven record. You have to be programmer with idea and some form of prototype. I have seen this first hand.
Can you see where I am going with this? Example: Recently I have been approached by startup making another service over successful API with React on top. They have build horrible product UX with bad copy on top of generic landing page. I can turn this product in profitable business by UX/UI redesign and proper CX. And what is in this for me? A "competitive salary"? Are you serious? NO.
No more design for pennies. Period. Yes, you can hire me to beautify your shit and implement front-end functionality but real design solutions are for my business ventures only. Actually like everyone else I am selling my time and expertise and just like everyone else I am searching "the easiest way to make money".
I will repeat my self: Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and
implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service.
> Figma is a product born of necessity and lack of vision from Sketch slipping on collaboration and implementation tools. But using web browser as a platform for design product has clear limitations. Figma is implementation tool - not creative tool. The best product will be something like Sketch with traditional license and multi-platform base with cloud based collaboration as a service.
I am curious about this point you’ve made. Can you help me understand this better?
I am someone who has switched from Sketch to Figma and I believe Figma is far superior for my use cases in nearly every way. Also, I believe that Figma’s free tier is excellent for casual users or those without a license from their company (between jobs). For me, Figma has been a breath of fresh air and the recent auto layout improvements have taken it to the next level. I work full time as a product designer.
I am biased in my view. But if you have spare time you can check what was Macromedia Fireworks approach to UI design process.
I somewhat agree with preommr on this:
"Figma is an absolutely awful design tool that has great collaboration features.
For a UI/UX design tool it has terrible constraints, and basically no support for state changes. There's variances now, which came out really recently. Before that, it was even worse. People would have separate designs for each possible state.
Let alone how limited the possible actions are. It's just frames, boxes, and vector elements."
> basically no support for state changes
I agree that this is a major problem. User interfaces are full of state changes and Figma requires a new artboard for every state. While this is an issue, I’m not aware of any software that has solved this. Do you know of any?
Actually Adobe killed Fireworks in attempt to push more users in Photoshop/Illustrator land. I remember clearly paying a license only to find out months later that Fireworks is dead.
Reusing common elements across UIs is a good thing. People complain about the “standard” splash page layout, or the stereotypical web-app styling... but Jakob’s Law is real, and users don’t want to learn another damn UI paradigm, they want to use your product to solve their problems. Reuse simplifies learning and so is a massive positive from an end-user perspective, and making the user’s life better is the designers role.
As you’ve noted, Figma is not infinitely flexible. For graphic design this would be a drawback, as novelty is heavily rewarded. But for UX design? Novelty is less important, and correctly communicating how a design should be implemented is much more essential to a user’s experience. And if I need maximum flexibility I can always use another tool.
I’m not claiming everything is perfect in Figma or the industry - but I think the doom is overstated.