Figma Adoption in Product design

Have you ever heard the phrase “herding cats?” My version is “wrangling feral chickens”…I have worked with decently large teams of 20-30 designers at a time and successfully was able to encourage designers to use the Figma libraries consistency and often.

I bet you were hoping there was a secret method to getting designers to use the Figma libraries…there isn’t. These are some of the areas I focus on to encourage designers to use Figma libraries. The ratio of these methods are different depending on if you have high-adopters who have yearned for a system, or naysayers who have a more challenging time utilizing libraries.

Like someone else shared with me, this is more of an art rather than a science.

Listening

Being an empathetic listener is crucial. There will always been underlying truths that you will discover with the things designers are telling, or not telling you.

Many times I find that component/library discoverability is a challenge for designers. Designers didn’t know what to search for to find a component and/or they’re not sure how to search.

Observing

Designers sharing their screens/files provides insight as to how they are leveraging the tool and searching for components. You can quickly identify where there are holes just by watching how they work. Paired with listening, seeing the actions they take or do not take helps me determine what kind of Figma architecture and how it could improve user adoption.

Communication / Surveys

Lots of it. I’m buying a new keyboard every year because I wear down the keys so much (rage typing). Works in progress, updates, newsletters blogs, status updates, anything that gives insight to designers on whats happening gives a sense of community and promotes knowledge sharing.

Finding advocates

Use your teams! My normal is to default to Principals/Design Managers/Seniors to help spread the word and help catch component usage during their reviews. The design system advocates are an extension of the system and often times cross pollinate adoption.

Responding promptly

Designers are always busy and probably have little downtime to wait for answer before reviews. Responding to Slack messages and Figma comments in a timely manner is a key responsibility that I practice to make sure no one gets stuck. Even if there is not a definitive answer, something is better than nothing at all.

Workshop / Demo sessions

Listening, watching and communication is the fastest path to generating content for workshops and learning demos. This way you are catering to the team who uses the system and building individual designers skills whole also showing them some benefits of having a system. I like the more personalized route and having team members submit topics they want to either jam on, or get mentoring/training on.

Things Id like to try

Figma Onboarding Session(s): After talking with Jon Delman, he suggested a design system onboarding training session(s) that included a deck with links, images and other handy resources. I have yet to try this myself - it’s in the queue of things to try! I love the idea of sitting down with either a group or individual designers and presenting them with a proper onboarding to better orient them to the orgs design system.

Parsed out ownership: A method that came up to promote the naysayers into adoption is having them own a part of the design system or contribute to a component.

Check out the LinkedIn post, I got some really awesome comments and suggestions from others.