My main use case for Figma is to design pages for the website and new features and functionality. I haven't been doing it so much lately, but I definitely used to use it quite a bit more, designing new features, although I don't actually do the design, as there's a design team that works on it.
One of the projects I worked on with Figma is a CMS system.
Figma really helped clarify the requirements during the design and planning of the CMS for analysis articles because the designers would create a visual for the CMS, how it would work, and then we would iterate on it. It was a combination of design and then collaborating and iterating on the design.
The best features Figma offers include the ability to create a design system, which the designers really appreciated, as well as the organization of design assets for the purposes of development. I would say those are the two main features.
The design system feature and the organization of design assets help our team by ensuring that the team is better able to conform to the design system. By managing the design system within Figma, it's easy for other designers to pull out materials and to quickly build new designs based on our existing design system.
Figma has positively impacted our organization because we just live in Figma and certain teams just live in Figma all the time, which has really allowed us to make sure that our designs are consistent and that there is a standard way of producing those designs and consuming those designs. It's standardization of the design process and it has an influence on our entire website.
One negative aspect about our main use case or how we used Figma in that project is that the notifications were a little bit difficult to follow. For example, if a designer marks up some part of Figma, we don't necessarily know about it on the product side, and it's hard to keep track of all of that, especially when we use Slack for our regular workflow.
Figma can be improved by enhancing the notifications to let people know that there's a new message in Figma, just to make sure that people see the notification that it's meant to go to the person who's meant to receive it.
I have been using Figma for probably a couple of years, about two or three years.
The advice I would give to others looking into using Figma is that it's a great tool. I rate Figma seven out of ten.