5 ways to use Figma that you probably never thought of | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s real-time collaboration makes it useful for far more than traditional interface design. The post highlights five applications that use shared editing to organize information, make decisions, divide repetitive work, encourage creative collaboration, and have fun. Its central conclusion is that Figma’s multiplayer capabilities can support nearly any activity involving visual thinking and teamwork.

Affinity Diagrams for Organizing Ideas

• Teams can collect large amounts of research or brainstormed ideas in one shared file.
• Participants add concepts simultaneously, then group related items into themes.
• This process helps clarify priorities and create structure for complex projects, even when collaborators work remotely.

Real-Time Voting for Design Decisions

• Teams can review multiple design options together and mark their preferences directly in Figma.
• Instead of printing designs and using physical stickers, participants place circles or other markers beside favored concepts.
• Seeing votes accumulate in real time makes individual preferences clearer and helps teams reach decisions faster.

Design Assembly Lines for Repetitive Work

• Large, repetitive tasks can be divided among several people working in parallel.
• ClassPass used this approach to create more than 30 custom maps, with designers placing location pins for gyms and studios in different cities.
• Multiplayer collaboration allows teams to complete simple production tasks quickly through coordinated effort.

Collaborative Comic Creation

• Figma can serve as a shared illustration environment where friends or colleagues draw and develop ideas together.
• USC students Louis Harboe and Parker Malachowsky used it to turn a presentation about AI and healthcare into an accessible comic.
• Reusable components such as speech balloons, caption boxes, and image panels helped organize the longer project.
• Figma’s vector networks provided flexibility for drawing and editing illustrations.

Games for Team Connection

• Figma’s multiplayer features can also be used for recreational games and playful activities.
• Collaborative play offers a way to lighten the mood and strengthen relationships when teams are not working.
• This reflects the influence of cooperative multiplayer video games on Figma’s collaboration model.

Figma’s shared canvas is valuable wherever people need to think visually together. Teams can use it not only for design production, but also for research synthesis, group decisions, repetitive workflows, creative projects, and informal team-building.