I think things evolve in a spiral, where old ideas are recycled with a twist that makes them more appealing.
The tools before the mobile era, the canceled Adobe Thermo (aka Flash Catalyst), Microsoft Expression Blend, and recently Framer (which now is a website creation tool like Webflow), tried to fill the gap between design, prototyping, and implementation. But, they failed because web frameworks move fast, and nobody wants a vendor lock-in of unmaintainable code.
Maybe the Figma killer finally finds a way to solve it in a way that makes designers and developers happy.
I think (or hope) it's some combination between using real code (such as Storybook) in combination with a GUI. This has the following benefits:
- There is only source of truth and it's the code
- People who can't code (most designers) can still build prototypes with available components
- No (manual) synchronization between code a drawing tool (Figma, Penpot) needed
At the moment it looks like UXPin is going in this direction.
Yep, I agree. And I agree that designers can't "code", but to be more specific, it's more that they shouldn't be implementing functionality. So if a designer is designing a calculator, and the calculator returns 1+1=3, then the designer is not liable for fixing it.
On the other hand, if by "writing code" we mean the literal act of writing something that both a human and a computer can understand, then that's a different question. Designers need to express nuance, and GUI tools are limited in their ability to handle complexity. There's a reason visual programming tools haven't overtaken code.
What I'm getting at is that there very well could be a "language" specifically tailored for UI/UX designers, that allows them to specify their design decisions for the presentational layer of the application. If you had such a language, you could create a toolchain on top of it, which produces real code for developers to consume however they wish.
The tools before the mobile era, the canceled Adobe Thermo (aka Flash Catalyst), Microsoft Expression Blend, and recently Framer (which now is a website creation tool like Webflow), tried to fill the gap between design, prototyping, and implementation. But, they failed because web frameworks move fast, and nobody wants a vendor lock-in of unmaintainable code.
Maybe the Figma killer finally finds a way to solve it in a way that makes designers and developers happy.