web-apps

2 posts

figma

Figma Make Is Now Available to All Users | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma has moved Figma Make and other AI features out of beta and made them available to all users. Figma Make is positioned as a prompt-to-app tool that lets people create interactive, high-fidelity prototypes without extensive technical skills. The company argues that this speeds up exploration and alignment while enabling designers, engineers, researchers, and product managers to participate more directly in product development. ## Figma Make Becomes Generally Available - Users can create prototypes and web apps through natural-language prompts. - New capabilities include: - Importing an existing Figma library, including colors, typography, styling, and usage guidelines. - Connecting prototypes to backend data through a Supabase integration. - Figma’s other AI features, including Make and Edit Image and Boost Resolution, are also leaving beta. - Publishing Figma Make files remains in beta. ## Availability, Seats, and AI Credits - **Full seat users** receive the full Figma Make and AI experience, including private sharing and publishing capabilities. - **View, Collab, and Dev seat users** can create unlimited Make files in drafts and use the AI features available to their seats. - **Starter plan users** can create unlimited draft files and share up to three Make files with their team. - AI credits are included with all seats. - Full-seat monthly allocations are: - Professional: 3,000 credits, estimated at 50–70 Make prompts. - Organization: 3,500 credits, estimated at 60–80 prompts. - Enterprise: 4,250 credits, estimated at 80–100 prompts. - Figma plans to offer additional credits for purchase later. Full-seat limits will not initially be strictly enforced, while lower limits for Starter, View, Collab, and Dev users are enforced daily and monthly. ## Faster, More Collaborative Product Development - Figma says Make supports the broader development process, not just prototyping. - Designers can test complex interactions. - Engineers can produce high-fidelity design artifacts. - Product managers can build functional mockups to validate ideas. - The tool encourages teams to experiment, take risks, and discuss concrete artifacts rather than abstract descriptions. ## Making Prototyping More Accessible - Figma argues that language alone often fails to communicate how a product should look and feel. - Traditional prototypes can be time-consuming or inaccessible to people without design or development expertise. - Natural-language prompting allows more team members to turn ideas into realistic prototypes quickly. - Figma researcher Rie McGwier used Make to build a Survey Traffic Calculator for managing roughly 30 surveys across eight products. - The prototype modeled weekly active users, audience overlap, response rates, recontact windows, sampling requirements, and other constraints, producing a dashboard to help avoid oversampling. Figma’s recommendation is to use Make as a collaborative exploration tool: teams can rapidly turn ideas into working artifacts, test assumptions, and refine solutions before committing to full implementation.

figma

Behind the Plugins: Jackie Chui, UX Designer @ Microsoft | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Jackie Chui, a UX designer on Microsoft’s PowerApps team, combines design and coding to build tools that make designers more efficient. After exploring Figma’s API during a 2018 hackathon, he developed numerous plugins, including Find and Replace, Paste to Fill, and Button Resizer. His work reflects Figma’s broader goal of bringing designers and developers closer together through extensible design tools. ## From LEGO Building to UX and Code - Chui’s childhood interest in inventing with LEGO later translated into a passion for UX design. - He learned coding alongside design so he could build and test the products he envisioned. - He finds inspiration by studying other people’s work and connecting ideas across projects. ## Exploring Figma’s API - Chui began experimenting with Figma’s platform more than a year before the interview. - His first plugin project came from Microsoft’s 2018 OneWeek Hackathon, where his team explored accessibility features for design tools. - Discovering API functions that could simulate user actions sparked his interest in plugin development. - He praised Figma’s official API as easy to use and stable. ## Plugins for Faster Design Work - His most anticipated community plugin was **Find and Replace**. - Other projects included: - **Paste to Fill** - **Button Resizer** - Numerous additional productivity tools for Microsoft and the wider Figma community - His goal was to help designers work faster and smarter while encouraging others to build their own tools. ## Building Figma Plus - Chui’s proudest project was **Figma Plus**, which began as browser-only Chrome extensions. - Community feedback revealed that users wanted the tools to work in Figma’s desktop application. - Working with Mirko Santangelo and Ahmad Al Haddad, he expanded the project into a complete platform featuring: - Its own API - A plugin store - A publishing process - The project’s development prepared the team to participate in Figma’s official plugins beta. ## The Future of Design and Development - Chui expects designers and developers to work more closely as design tools increasingly bridge the gap between their workflows. - Because Figma became Microsoft’s primary design tool, building on its platform was a natural way to improve his team’s process and contribute to the broader community. - His plugins were scheduled to become publicly available with Figma’s plugin launch on August 1, 2019. Figma’s plugin ecosystem demonstrates how designers with coding skills can extend their tools, automate repetitive tasks, and create shared solutions for the wider design community.