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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The Figma as a design space works better when the designers understand that constraints of HTML/CSS/JS animations. That's not often the case in reality (unless you hire around that idea).

I find many Figma designs basically force you to use fancy JS to assemble their UI designs. I know everyone uses React these days but you really shouldn't have to constantly write JS just to reproduce what's in a UI design. It creates so much needless dev and browser overhead.

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Reading the other threads as well, I got the feeling it's more a culture or process problem than tooling per se.

The excessively fancy UI issue can be avoided if the devs enter the process at the prototyping phase. And Figma can be used for that: start with a wirefame and get everyone's input, comments, or even let the devs make counterpropositions (basically MRs?) by tweaking a copy of whatever screens are worked on. And as the design gets closer to reality the back and forth can continue in Figma.

That requires team collaboration and the willingness to build decent HTML/CSS in the first place, none of which are a given, but for teams working at that level it's a boon.

You can do it that way but it’s not the easy path. I think the problem with the tool is that Figma makes it too easy to make polished interactive designs that look done. The easy path is just to skip the wireframe, so by the time the programmer gets involved, the designer and management has already fallen in love with what appears to be a final product.

If figma was built on top of HTML and CSS—and so couldn’t represent designs that HTML and CSS can’t, this might be less of an issue.

Granted it would still be a problem because there are always underlying technical and processes issues that should be uncovered before you leave the wireframe phase that have nothing to do with HTML and CSS.

Agreed.

> the designer and management has already fallen in love with what appears to be a final product.

This is probably the crux of the issue. It's the same process as asking a famous illustrator to draw a cool house, and then ask some random architect to make it a reality. I'm always amazed at people doing so, that's not the type of house I'd like to live in.

You are right that tools don't solve problems, but they can cause them.

The problem here is that designers are limited by their tools. Figma can only do 10% of what CSS is capable of.

We can try to work around those issues with closer collaboration early on, but the truth is that most of the problems aren't universal. They are constructed

It works better in house for sure or with a good agency. There's a whole industry of fancy corporate design agencies that produce Figmas and developer-in-the-loop means going into lots of meetings with the consultancy managers and then waiting a week and a couple grand in hourly for them to produce something that needs to be fixed again.

But ignoring those fixable processes and hiring issues, there is plenty to be said about the new world of isolated islands of UI/UX designers, frontend, backend teams. I blame Javascript/React eating the world more than Figma. React/Vue opened up a whole hyper complex world of UI design and shit rolls downhill from UI->frontend->backend->users (mostly via performance/complexity).

100% The problem is that Figma is not a web design tool. It is a vector drawing tool. It only covers about 10% of what CSS can do so you are never going to get good web design from a Figma file.

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