In our org, we’ve transitioned a lot of mobile engineers and design projects from Zeplin to Figma, but our engineers are used to using the search function in Zeplin to find particular screens and screen states. The current Figma search functionality sort of allows them to search for ‘screens’ by applying the Frame/Group filter, but it also returns a large amount of extraneous results of frames or groups that are embedded in the actual screens (since screens are technically created as frames in Figma, but not every frame is a screen). This potentially creates a lot of noise in the search results.

An example is that I might have a screen titled ‘Options > Share’ which demonstrates a particular share feature in the app. That screen may also contain numerous frames or groups titled ‘Icon > Share > Twitter’, ‘Icon > Share > Facebook’, ‘Icon > Share > Slack’, etc… for every type of share icon that’s present on the screen. In this case, an engineer searching for the ‘Options > Share’ screen in the file may use the search term ‘share’ to find the screen. The problem is that the search results will be very noisy because every item or element containing ‘Share’ is also returned (in this case, 30 share icons). In reality they only intended to search for screens on the page.

I believe there should be some additional filter option or affordance to narrow down search results to screens/frames that are not embedded within anything else. In this case, the solution might be to:

• Add an additional filter option called Screens, or called Base Frames or something similar


• Or, when Frame/Groups is selected as a filter option, add a toggle affordance that says something like “Only include top level frames” (basically anything that isn’t encompassed by another frame or group) which would filter out embedded frames and groups from the search results