Our designers use Figma but the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts. Additionally the UX has tons of hidden features making it hard for non experts to discover how to do simple things like export mockups.
As a result the designers have a backlog of small busy work changes instead of focusing on the key design questions. No one else has licenses to make updates or knows how to use the tool.
The product team has started using Whimsical which is easier to use and is more reasonably priced for people who only use it occasionally or need to quickly illustrate low fidelity concepts. Now we have two design tools to essentially get around UX and pricing problems.
> […] the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts
I completely agree.
I don't see the Figma files as an output that designers produce. I see it as a product on its own that people should be able to collaborate on.
I'm not going to stop a designer from sending me pull requests. In fact, for small mundane updates I'd LOVE it, since it would take this burden away from me. In fact, our inhouse designers all have GitHub accounts, so in theory they are able to.
But when I want to tweak a little thing in a Figma file, like adjust naming of the symbols, clean up icons, add more diverse examples of the content to document edge cases, or to have grounds for my next discussion with a designer or engineer, I'm not allowed to. Also quite often the thing that I want to do is not necessarily meant for designers, but for my fellow developers. Things like technical notes for implementation.
> the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts
Licensing models that don’t scale can cause tremendous problems. Early on, design can become a bottleneck. Later, simple changes might be rejected because the cost of redesign is too high. In the worst cases, developers will work ahead of design to meet deadlines (since not every team can afford an expert in the design tool) and the resulting variances will be challenging to reconcile/resolve.
Expensive, high learning curve tools can introduce silos and bottlenecks into an organization.
I love Whimsical. It's just so damn smooth and reliable.
All that being said, I think wanting one tool to serve not just designers but also product teams is probably too high of an expectation. We don't blame developer tooling if designers have a hard time making small updates to demonstrate design concepts. They're different domains, so different tooling is expected.
As a result the designers have a backlog of small busy work changes instead of focusing on the key design questions. No one else has licenses to make updates or knows how to use the tool.
The product team has started using Whimsical which is easier to use and is more reasonably priced for people who only use it occasionally or need to quickly illustrate low fidelity concepts. Now we have two design tools to essentially get around UX and pricing problems.