Please make Dev Mode Annotations visible by all roles, not just Full Dev Mode seats. This can become costly for users needing context but not all the other dev-mode features.
Here’s the scenario:
We have a dashboard, with cards showing a customer’s account status. This status can be mapped from multiple back-end statuses, to show just one front-end status. For example, any of the following could be mapped to a single status known to the customer as “Completed”: canceled, terminated, sold, complete, etc.
This is something that the developer needs to reference, but then also the PM needs to reference in writing tickets (who doesn’t need full dev-mode access), the QE needs to reference for testing automations, and various other individuals on our team. Placing it in a comment makes it less clearly attached to the specific piece of the design, and requires us to keep documentation dispersed among different tools (Jira, Confluence, Figma etc).
Simply making Dev mode annotations visible to viewers would make for far less duplicate documentation or added dependency on other documentation tools for a designer and team.
+100 Totally agree. I really love the new annotations but as mentioned by others the usefulness and value is very limited if only designers or developers can see them. reviewers and other stakeholders shouldn’t need dev seats.
Careful Figma, you’re going the way of Adobe. I feel like you’re very focused on internal teams and forgetting many, many people use Figma in agency settings and need to share view-only links with clients. Clients absolutely need to see annotations — or at least give the option in the sharing settings.
Fully agree - this is actually a feature I’ve been waiting for years for, but is useless since it requires paid seats. This feature is dead in the water unless all users can see them.
I just spent 2 hours setting up annotations for devs AND OTHER STAKEHOLDERS only to learn that the second group cannot see it?!
Are you seriously expecting dozens of occasional users to get dev license just because of this?
Well, two hours wasted, back to adding them manually as components. It’s so sad to see Figma slowly turning into Adobe… this is what happens when you have a monopoly unfortunately.
After spending two hours setting up detailed annotations, I learned that people with Viewer licenses do not see them.
Annotations are for explaining non-obvious behavior to devs and others including occasional users. While devs are the primary audience, in large enterprise settings (which segment I assume is Figma’s primary source of revenue) usually there’s a large number of stakeholders who are occasionally involved in conversations. It is infeasible to get a dev or editor seat to each person loosely involved in the project just because it’s needed for a convenience feature once a quarter.
We’re back to adding annotations manually, as overlaid components.
I just spent an hour adding annotations to my designs and circulating specs with my team, only to learn that my team couldn’t see them. If annotations are solely for me, then this should be more clear in the Figma interface. My managers have View seats, and do not need Edit or Dev seats.
As of this moment, I am completely confused about who sees annotations, what seat they need, and what the intent is. The annotations button appears in the regular interface view, which leads me to believe that it’s unrelated to Dev mode’s annotations.
This is very frustrating.
same here, found out about it by accident when the project manager and the client told me they couldn’t see my notes. such a disappointment
The new Figma Annotations feature is a disaster for my design team right now. Years ago, I created custom “Design Note” annotation components & “Design QA” notes to drop on a canvas to serve exactly this purpose, to communicate details to PMs and Developers, most of whom don’t have paid editor or dev mode seats.
My entire team of 25 designers recently switched over to Figma annotations, thinking this allowed them to communicate with hundreds of PMs and developers WHO CAN’T SEE any of these annotations.
Annotations are worse than a failure. They are the definition of a UX disaster. They appear to solve a problem, but fail anyway - worse than useless. When they didn’t exist, my designers knew to use our custom annotation notes to solve this problem.
What do all my viewers see instead? A very annoying request from Figma to upgrade to a Dev mode seat! Not cool.
Please make Figma annotations viewable by viewers right away, or at the very minimum, users with “Collab” access!
I had no idea! Thank you for this. I was just starting to use Annotations but they’re pointless if anyone with a “view” account cannot see them. Back to using my own sticky notes that I’ve created. That’s a HUGE oversight on Figma’s part.
Our team has spent so much time using these only to then share with PMs and Engineers who can’t see them. Should be available to anyone who can view the file, or Collab seat at maximum.
@figma Please open annotations for all. This is the single most useful feature for collaboration with the ~100+ people in our cross-functional teams. Obviously, we can’t afford a full seat for all of them. The has rendered this fabulous feature useless.
Here’s the pitch: while we can’t afford to give all those collaborators a full seat, we WILL need to buy more dev mode seats over time once we get more closely engaged with more development teams. Annotations is the perfect feature to help build those close collaborations and embedded relationships that necessitate Dev mode. Opening annotations to have basic feature availability will undoubtedly increase both our stickiness with Figma and our spend.
I’m quite upset about this as well. On March 31, annotations were visible to everyone no matter the seat. I was really excited because that meant me and my team didn’t have to use 3rd party, buggy, slow, clunky annotation plugins anymore. We need annotations to be visible for everyone - our org is huge and there’s no way everyone on the product and development teams are going to have Dev Mode. I just found out this morning that they are no longer visible without a design or dev seat, so all of the annotations I made for my PMs in early April are no longer serving their purpose. 😡
Same here, we need the annotations also for ‘View only’ users as our PMs, QAs and other stakeholders cannot see them. Please take into serious account this otherwise the feature is pretty unusable. thanks
Please make Dev Mode Annotations visible by all roles, not just Full Dev Mode seats. This can become costly for users needing context but not all the other dev-mode features.
Here’s the scenario:
We have a dashboard, with cards showing a customer’s account status. This status can be mapped from multiple back-end statuses, to show just one front-end status. For example, any of the following could be mapped to a single status known to the customer as “Completed”: canceled, terminated, sold, complete, etc.
This is something that the developer needs to reference, but then also the PM needs to reference in writing tickets (who doesn’t need full dev-mode access), the QE needs to reference for testing automations, and various other individuals on our team. Placing it in a comment makes it less clearly attached to the specific piece of the design, and requires us to keep documentation dispersed among different tools (Jira, Confluence, Figma etc).
Simply making Dev mode annotations visible to viewers would make for far less duplicate documentation or added dependency on other documentation tools for a designer and team.
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+100 Totally agree. I really love the new annotations but as mentioned by others the usefulness and value is very limited if only designers or developers can see them. reviewers and other stakeholders shouldn’t need dev seats.
Careful Figma, you’re going the way of Adobe. I feel like you’re very focused on internal teams and forgetting many, many people use Figma in agency settings and need to share view-only links with clients. Clients absolutely need to see annotations — or at least give the option in the sharing settings.
Another up for making Annotations visible for everyone. This is such a bummer and I really don’t understand this decision of Figma
+1 yes, figma annotations viewable to all!
+1 for allowing annotations to be visible for all 🙏🏻
+1 for allowing annotations to be visible for all 🙏🏻
+1 for allowing annotations to be visible for all 👹
Fully agree - this is actually a feature I’ve been waiting for years for, but is useless since it requires paid seats. This feature is dead in the water unless all users can see them.
This is actually why I don’t use them, I hope this changes so it brings better collaboration in Figma files
I just spent 2 hours setting up annotations for devs AND OTHER STAKEHOLDERS only to learn that the second group cannot see it?!
Are you seriously expecting dozens of occasional users to get dev license just because of this?
Well, two hours wasted, back to adding them manually as components. It’s so sad to see Figma slowly turning into Adobe… this is what happens when you have a monopoly unfortunately.
After spending two hours setting up detailed annotations, I learned that people with Viewer licenses do not see them.
Annotations are for explaining non-obvious behavior to devs and others including occasional users. While devs are the primary audience, in large enterprise settings (which segment I assume is Figma’s primary source of revenue) usually there’s a large number of stakeholders who are occasionally involved in conversations. It is infeasible to get a dev or editor seat to each person loosely involved in the project just because it’s needed for a convenience feature once a quarter.
We’re back to adding annotations manually, as overlaid components.
Same as Zoli, spent significant time using annotations just to find out that stakeholders can’t see them.
This is a horrible monetization decision because we’re just going to go back using custom annotations via components.
arch_annette wrote:
I just spent an hour adding annotations to my designs and circulating specs with my team, only to learn that my team couldn’t see them. If annotations are solely for me, then this should be more clear in the Figma interface. My managers have View seats, and do not need Edit or Dev seats.
As of this moment, I am completely confused about who sees annotations, what seat they need, and what the intent is. The annotations button appears in the regular interface view, which leads me to believe that it’s unrelated to Dev mode’s annotations.
This is very frustrating.
same here, found out about it by accident when the project manager and the client told me they couldn’t see my notes. such a disappointment
Casting another vote for making annotations visible to all!
The new Figma Annotations feature is a disaster for my design team right now. Years ago, I created custom “Design Note” annotation components & “Design QA” notes to drop on a canvas to serve exactly this purpose, to communicate details to PMs and Developers, most of whom don’t have paid editor or dev mode seats.
My entire team of 25 designers recently switched over to Figma annotations, thinking this allowed them to communicate with hundreds of PMs and developers WHO CAN’T SEE any of these annotations.
Annotations are worse than a failure. They are the definition of a UX disaster. They appear to solve a problem, but fail anyway - worse than useless. When they didn’t exist, my designers knew to use our custom annotation notes to solve this problem.
What do all my viewers see instead? A very annoying request from Figma to upgrade to a Dev mode seat! Not cool.
Please make Figma annotations viewable by viewers right away, or at the very minimum, users with “Collab” access!
I had no idea! Thank you for this. I was just starting to use Annotations but they’re pointless if anyone with a “view” account cannot see them. Back to using my own sticky notes that I’ve created. That’s a HUGE oversight on Figma’s part.
@Alisha_Kurtz yup, came over from the thread you linked to open one here in the feedback section too.
This is a blocker for me, and the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so trying to be visible to the product team.
Our team has spent so much time using these only to then share with PMs and Engineers who can’t see them. Should be available to anyone who can view the file, or Collab seat at maximum.
Our developers with Dev Mode can’t even see the annotations. What’s the point?
+1k please open annotations for all.
@figma Please open annotations for all. This is the single most useful feature for collaboration with the ~100+ people in our cross-functional teams. Obviously, we can’t afford a full seat for all of them. The has rendered this fabulous feature useless.
Here’s the pitch: while we can’t afford to give all those collaborators a full seat, we WILL need to buy more dev mode seats over time once we get more closely engaged with more development teams. Annotations is the perfect feature to help build those close collaborations and embedded relationships that necessitate Dev mode. Opening annotations to have basic feature availability will undoubtedly increase both our stickiness with Figma and our spend.
I’m quite upset about this as well. On March 31, annotations were visible to everyone no matter the seat. I was really excited because that meant me and my team didn’t have to use 3rd party, buggy, slow, clunky annotation plugins anymore. We need annotations to be visible for everyone - our org is huge and there’s no way everyone on the product and development teams are going to have Dev Mode. I just found out this morning that they are no longer visible without a design or dev seat, so all of the annotations I made for my PMs in early April are no longer serving their purpose. 😡
Same here, we need the annotations also for ‘View only’ users as our PMs, QAs and other stakeholders cannot see them. Please take into serious account this otherwise the feature is pretty unusable. thanks
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