[jillesvangurp]

Figma is alright, if you use it right. The issue is that people are trying to create pixel perfect graphics designs in it, which is very fiddly and then has to be replicated in code.

So, you end up doing double work. An additional problem is that especially responsive applications with e.g. dark mode support, animations and css transitions, etc. can only be partially modeled in a pixel perfect way in Figma. You can do it but it's just very fiddly to do in Figma. And besides Figma's code export is useless for this; aligning design and implementation is mostly still manual work. And of course users only ever use the code version.

The proper way to use Figma is to focus less on the look and feel and instead use it to prototype UX flows. This is tedious and slow to prototype in code and this is where Figma can shine. Having a good component design system in Figma means that you just reuse the same components and don't have to waste brain cycles on their look and feel when designing a UX flow. It will roughly look like the real thing and you can click together a few new screens in minutes and compare a few alternatives. I work with good UX people and I see them use Figma effectively. Our designs aren't pixel perfect; generally. Though we do use it for e.g. icon design in svg form as well. But design and UX are two separate skills at this point with separate tool sets as well. Figma is alright for icon design but probably not the best tool.

This is of course not a new problem. People were designing web applications in Photoshop at the beginning of the century. UX was not a consideration and the people doing the design were graphics designers. Figma is arguably better but not necessarily aimed at graphics designers. It's a UX tool.

[silenced_trope]

No different than designers pre-Figma.

Many of the people in this thread are talking about designing web-sites. But I did work on mobile, specifically Android for the past decade.

It's amazing to me how many designers have always just designed for iOS, which just had a few form factors (1 or 2 iPhone sizes (more now) and 1 iPad size) -- I could never get them to design "responsive" like for Android's various form factors (device sizes + different resolutions).

Creating pixel-perfect designs that aren't flexible has always been the issue.

[pjmlp]

Or worse, PowerPoint.

I was involved in a few projects back in the glory JSF days, where the customers expected pixel perfect Web UIs, like they had been doing for years with Win32 and Motif.

What a fun it was. /s