| Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've only been on small design teams during the rise of Figma – but my view is that "multiplayer" was always a sell-to-managers feature, and at best an annoyance for designers. Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance. Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison. Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance. From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis. Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up. |