Hey @Ed_Tramell, sorry to hear you’re having trouble accessing the measure tool!

Since you mentioned that you don’t have or need edit access, my first guess is that you previously had a full seat, which did give you access to the Measure tool.

If you’d like to check any recent permissions changes on the backend, please reach out to the support team directly via this form: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thank you @dvaliao – that at least confirms my suspicion that it’s a permissions issue. My team will have to reevaluate the value that we are (or aren’t) getting out of pure Dev Mode without Edit Access.

Can you explain the rationale, though? I noticed that Annotations also disappeared. This makes sense to me – only someone with edit access (e.g. a designer) would be adding annotations as information for a developer. But as I mentioned for Measure, I don’t understand why the designer would ever add measurements – that’s something the implementer would add as needed. So the permissions seem completely backwards for Measure. Does that make sense?

Thanks for the feedback, @Ed_Tramell!

We hear you. This is definitely something our Dev mode team has gotten before. To advocate on your behalf and guide the team on how we can improve, we’d love to learn more about your specific use case.

If we gave you Measurements, without a full seat:

• Would you want those measurements to show for everyone, or just yourself?
• Would you want those measurements to persist (through page refreshes or leaving and coming back)?

We’ll update your topic into a feature request and pass this feedback onto the Dev mode team!

You’re welcome, @dvaliao – I’m glad the feedback was taken in the spirit it was intended!

For my specific use case on my specific team:

• I would want those measurements to show just for me. I’m implementing a design and trying to be as pixel-faithful as possible, so I add measurements to convert the design into sort of a blueprint to follow. I’m probably the only person on the whole team who needs those measurements for this particular piece of a design. (For anyone else, it would probably just clutter up the design to see my personal measurements.)
• I would definitely want the measurements to persist for the whole time I’m implementing this piece of the design. Mostly because I feel like I don’t have a lot of control over how/when Figma decides to refresh itself (I assume because of app updates or something?). I’d also expect the measurements to still be there if I navigated away and back. (If your developers are worried about the cost of persisting those measurements forever, then maybe there could be an expiration date or something before they get removed. Once I’m done implementing a page/dialog/whatever, I probably won’t ever need those specific measurements again and I could re-add certain ones if needed. But that’s a tricky thing to implement correctly without making some Figma user angry somewhere. 🙂)

Basically – I’d want Measurements to work pretty much exactly how it was working before it disappeared. (Based on what you said in your previous response, I’m still not sure why I had it for a while. But I did, and I used it while it was there. I can still see measurements I added to designs before I lost that ability.)

This is perfect, @Ed_Tramell!

We’ll pass this along to the team to discuss, and in the meantime, don’t forget to also Vote up top! ☝️

We use votes from the community to gauge the overall interest and impact implementing this change could make for all of our users. Thanks again!

I agree it would be very useful to have the interactive Measure tool available for Dev Mode licenses. That way, Developers could measure a design themselves rather than having to go back to their designer to ask for it to be marked up!

I agree with everything ​@Ed_Tramell has said. I equally love using the measurement tool and I believe it to be more of a developer tool than a designer tool so having it available to those with Full Access in Dev Mode makes more sense to me than letting just designers use it.

Would love this feature back without needing Design Mode edit access please and thank you!

The measurement tool is a feature the devs that I work with are constantly asking for and when we switched from zeplin to figma (dev mode) for our hand-off tool the developers were all excited about finally being able to have a way to measure things when they needed to. We are just now discovering that none of the devs have access to this since they have dev-mode only seats.

I’ve been playing with the Measure and Annotation features that are newly in Design Mode and will say they are very nice to have at my fingertips now. Well done!

I agree with the posters who think the Measurements and Annotations need to be visible to view-only users also, since they’re frequently reviewing this type of work.

Also our developers are missing the measurement tool. Please re-enable it for the Dev Mode.

I’m adding to this as well. I’m a developer and our company recently switched from another UI design application to Figma, I was using the previous application’s ruler equivalent all the time, so now it’s a bit frustrating that I can’t accurately measure things easily.

 

• Would you want those measurements to show for everyone, or just yourself?
  - Just myself
• Would you want those measurements to persist 
  - I don’t mind really; I don’t need them to persist, but if they do just make it easy to delete them.

Thank you!

As a developer, I’ve also found the measurement tool in Dev Mode extremely useful and feel really frustrated that we can’t have it anymore. 😥

What Figma needs to see here are the following points IMO:

• developers don’t always structure elements the same way as designers do - even when cooperation is really fluid between them. Some things only literally come up during development phase. And a grouping that makes sense from the designer point of view, sometimes needs to be different in code, ie. because our existing components are structured such a way.
• sometimes we need relative measurements - we don’t have the eyes of designers, I need to see if a group of elements is the same width as another (or another group of) element(s). This doesn’t mean that the tool should have extra functionality; I’m just emphasizing the importance of easy manual measurements.
• I get there might be tricks and shortcuts etc. to still measure, but we are developers and we use Figma differently (compared to designers), plus we don’t have the same “dexterity” and muscle memory for that like designers do - however, the measurement tool was absolutely easy and straightforward to use, so this was simply not a problem. 

As for the above questions about what behavior we’d expect of the tool: 

• it is OK (even desirable) if measurement lines are only visible for me (or it should be super easy to delete them)
• they shouldn’t persist IMO, I’d typically only measure what I need once or twice (it was so straightforward that re-doing it is simply not a problem) 

I hope Figma reconsiders this decision and we can get back the plain old measurement tool that we had until April 2024. 

I just wanted to weigh in here as well. I am also a developer that could really use the measure tool. Here is an example I just ran into and brought me to this thread.

In this case I have two text elements beside each other horizontally. “Locations & ATMs” is the first element and “Over 40,000 fee-free ATMs.” is the second. I want to know the gap between the two elements, but it looks like there is maybe an extra space in the “Locations & ATMs “ element. That means that the gap is not 23px but is probably more around 40px.

In this case, I could go file a ticket to request that the designer remove a single space from their text box and properly space the two elements, but it sure would be a whole lot easier to just measure myself.

We really need the measurement function in the developer mode, too. It is very important for our project. Without it, Figma does not seem to be the right tool … since we have to talk to the designers for so much small measures or have to calculate that stuff ourself. We would save so much time with this simple tool.