Designers, we have a “Figmaism” problem
Designers are obsessed with Figma. Here’s why it’s a problem.
Figmaism — an obsession with tooling at the expense of other (and often more important) skills.
Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being great at tooling. In fact, this is mandatory for being a successful designer.
However, while 90% of UX design content on LinkedIn/Twitter focuses on visuals, Figma, and design systems, the hard skills are just a fraction of what companies evaluate designers at.
For my last book, I’ve researched how 50+ companies evaluate designers and employees including Etsy, Medium, Dropbox, Figma, Zendesk, Intercom, and Coursera.
For example, at Twitter, hard skills accounted for less than 25% of the total designer evaluation formula (the rest are: getting things done, creating strong relationships, and improving the team). At other companies, hard skills were just one of 4–10 competencies as well.
So why are we spending 90% of our time talking about things that don’t matter?
There are some of the reasons:
- Short-form content gets better traction — visually appealing and “one quick trick”-type of content works better on social media. Such posts get the most engagement misleading designers to believe that these are also the most important issues to focus on.
- Market over-saturation of aspiring UX designers — “content creators” are mostly targeting junior designers or designers trying to enter the field (for whom such content is relevant) because they are an easy target. And there’s a lot of them. Which means a lot of engagement. Eventually, it misleads both designers who already got into the industry and aspiring designers who are getting the wrong perception of the product design role (believing it’s all about your Figma-jitsu)
- Designers prefer to stay in their comfort zone — sometimes I feel that Figmaism is just designers’ psychological defence response. It’s easier to focus on Figma and pushing pixels instead of facing the KPIs, OKRs, and roadmaps (AKA the things that are actually important).
- Designers' growth crisis — Designers don’t know what are they supposed to do and which skills to improve in order to grow their careers. This confusion leads them to focus on learning what others seem to be learning. (I expanded on this in “The Path to Senior Product Designer”)
So what should you do?
If you’re reading this and already working as a designer, you’re very likely already good enough at Figma. Keeping learning it over other skills slows down your career growth.
To grow as a designer focus on the things that bring business value beyond pixels, for example:
- Presenting design — learn how to sell your ideas and educate others in the org on the impact of design.
- Mentoring designers and other roles in the org to scale your knowledge and impact.
- Learning how to provide helpful feedback to help the company reduce errors and improve speed.
- Improving hiring processes of designers and beyond — optimize the hiring funnel, whiteboarding exercises, create better onboarding documentation, etc.
- Taking ownership of new projects and initiatives
- Understanding how businesses work and how you can help your company make more money or reduce costs
- Helping the company find talent (one of the main challenges for companies). Organise meetups, create a website for the design team and share your processes publically to attract design candidates.
- Improving your written and oral communications to help org move faster.
These skills will most certainly make you a better designer than knowing another Figma trick.
If you’re not sure how to improve these skills, check out my last book “The Path to Senior Product Designer”.
