Figma Spec Feature Request.

Figma Spec announcement this week is brilliant. I already know that of a lot of different things I’ll be able to do with it immediately which will considerably increase and improve my design workflow. These features additions to Figma Spec would hands down flip my design workflow on its head.

1. Figma Spec document library

Basically this would be the same concept as the assets library, but instead having a specs or document library.

This would allow you to access all of the spec documents in your design file from a single top level UI navigation element and be able to create folders and sections of all the different spec documents in your design file.

Why this is useful is that in very large design files with lots of pages, layers and stuff. You might not actually want to navigate all the design files to find the spec that you need and if you only going to read or updated the content in the spec, having to navigate to it through the files pages is a bit slow and pointless.

If you could set it up as document library with folders structures that would be super helpful to be organise your specs files into different types. These spec files could replace the all the onboarding pages, instructional as well as design workflow project workflow tracking as well as being able to document specs, so this folder structure would be brilliant!

Versioning and branching of the spec files would be really nice too.

2. Figma Spec pinned floating document preview.

This one would absolutely kill it for me personally. As someone who always writes notes on the canvas and is frequently dragging those little notes or ad-hoc work instructions/todo lists around with me as I navigated my design file. It’s a real pain having to find them and move them around and place them on the design space so that they don’t get in the way.

One of the features I love to use now is to add links to different content, canvases, frames, comments etc,. into these little notes as well so that you can use the note as a quick reference navigation tool.

With this Figma Spec update, if you could provide the option to view an instance of the Spec document as a pinned UI element that floats on-top of the art-board but followed you around the place as you moved around the different pages of the file and frames, you can basically create a little floating notebook with the spec, that would always be in view.

So if you had a spec with instructions on how to do perform a certain design task or you had a spec that had a list of todo’s or had a spec that outlined your own design process stages, with dates and status etc,. you could then link these elements from the spec to the work frames in you figma file adding notes to the spec as you worked and always being able to find what you were doing, or keep a more complex track of where any of the stages of your work in progress.

These floating specs could also be used as in context design team instructions on how to use the various parts of the teams design system or any unique process or rituals that the team has, and because it’s all document as a spec in a the library you could have it accessible to the designers in the team where ever they are in the file.

I think that the critical thing with this is that pinning the spec shouldn’t move the spec from its original position on the page or in a frame. It simply creates a preview window of the spec that acts like a notes buddy that you can edit as you move around the figma file.

Anyways,

So many great updates this week but Figma spec for me is going to have a huge impact on the actually way we work and collaborate as teams, and if you can look into some of these options, it will just mean I won’t have to try to work out how to hack Spec or build some random plugin in solution for it.

Thanks!