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I’m not really looking for solutions here. As a long time user I just want to express how I have really run out of patience with all the half-baked UI redesigns of Figma. Over the last 2 years the experience of battling to find previously obvious features has become truly dreadful. Day to day use has become a massive productivity drain, and the complex integration of questionable new functionality  has eroded any previous goodwill I had for the company.

All I wanted to do today was to search for a plugin, and I couldn’t even find the entry point. I know i’ve found it before, but with so many changes to the UI design I couldn’t remember where. There isn’t even any mention of it in the Figma Help site. I mean, it makes sense right? Who would be interested in an existing productivity feature or actual design tool when we’ve got all the shiny AIs to promote? 

Thanks to an article by Harsha Vardhan N I found the tiny indistinct button in the bottom left of the Back Stage or Home view, or Whatever-This-Mess-Is-Supposed-To-Be view. That wasn’t a waste of my time at all 😒.

Once in the Community I have to contend with the misguided ‘search first’ policy that sadly has spread like a virus to the new forum design as well. Where are the categories so that I can psychologically orient myself and narrow down the displayed content in order to browse efficiently? Why can I no longer sort by most popular plugins? If you’re going to throw this very familiar mental model in the bin, you damn well better replace it with something superior. 

The new forum home page feels much the same. It prioritises a huge search field, then a snapshot of featured topics and latest forum posts that I am 99.999% sure will never serendipitously answer the question I have. As far as I can see there is no way to navigate directly to the full list of forum categories. You have to click on ‘Ask The Community’ button, then click on Forum Categories’ in the breadcrumb trail (!!) to go back up a level. Like I said, half baked UX design. The original figma forum community used to rock, but I hardly use it as a resource now.

As for UI3, just stop contextually hiding all the commands I want to use. Seriously. Just stop it. And while we’re at it, please rethink your nonsensical grouping of features in the Appearance palette. And that stupid floating toolbar with the Action menu that is populated by a seemingly random collection of unrelated and not useful AI determined clutter. You are not serving my needs.

For a company that used to espouse the foundational values of ease of use, designing in the flow, learnability and other out of favour UX principles, this feels like another step away from the user base, and a step towards a profit driven future where the cadence of new feature releases is one of the most important KPIs.

There are reasons why the average lifespan of companies has significantly declined since the 1990s. Just sayin.

Before UI3, this forum was filled with posts where people were complaining about the increasing amount of clutter in the Figma UI. UI3, for all its faults, took some steps to address that by reducing clutter.

I think a lot of your points are valid. UI3 seems to prioritize navigation for power users who are comfortable with using the command launcher. I’m one of those people who uses the keyboard nav for everything—I don’t think I’ve clicked something in that floating toolbar even once—so for me personally UI3 has fit my work style perfectly, but I can see why this wouldn’t be the case for everyone.

Aside from UI3 which was obviously a big change, I don’t think there have been too many UI updates. Your points about the UX of Community are very fair—that does change constantly, and the way to access Community from the file browser has probably changed 8 times over the last few years. And searching for Community resources and navigating back to your results is often very painful.

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