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.

Found another forum on this topic: 

It could be better if we can toggle the visibility of each annotation. Like something: I can see where it has some annotation but this only shows up when I pass mouse over. To clear our documentation

 

I like the previous annotation interaction better, now it covers other information and it’s annoying. it should be based on your zoom level/ click to see the whole annotation or just a sign that there is an annotation in that place to optimise the use of real estate.

​@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

Can you please extend the annotation feature to regular visitors as well? Not only designers are interested in them. My business stakeholders also need to be able to read them. Many thanks!

+1 to make annotations visible to all. Otherwise they can’t be used..

+1 PLEASE allow annotations for anyone. My PLMs will need to see these and it's ridiculous to add this many licenses. 

+1 for making annotations visible to viewers. We cannot use the feature as is since we need to do custom annotations for viewers now and won’t be doing double the work.

+1 ANNOTATIONS VIEW FOR ALL! It’s frustrating after spending so time making the annotations to find out that they don’t work for all :(

The annotations feature is nice, but it’s pretty frustrating that you’ve chosen to only allow editors and developers access to them.

I frequently have a need to share annotations with other stakeholders (developers, support, other product managers and designers). By implementing them in the way you have, you’ve excluded product managers with view access from seeing my annotations. Most of the PMs I work with only have viewer licences which means they are unable to see them.

My alternatives are that I use Comments instead of Annotations (which is a misuse of Comments for developer and interaction notes IMO) or I spin my own and make components of them.

Please make annotations visible to all users; not just editors and developers.

Please allow annotations for viewer licenses. It is such an amazing feature for sending extra notes to non-designers about how to implement. After spending so much time setting them up all over my designs, I just found out my team cannot read them!! Now I need to go back and un-do all that work and put text notes back in.

I completely agree—viewers must be able to see annotations. If this isn't a bug, then it's an extremely short-sighted decision, possibly a misguided attempt at monetization.

As someone working for a SaaS company, most of my viewers are internal stakeholders—sales teams, product managers, and executives—none of whom are developers. Expecting them to become developers just to fully understand a project is absurd. And for those working with external clients, this issue is even more frustrating. Under the current setup, you'd have to grant a client developer access just so they can see project annotations, which makes no sense.

While component-based annotations and comments provide a workaround, they are a poor substitute. This approach is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t result in additional charges just to let people see how something is supposed to function. Restricting annotation creation to full and developer subscriptions is understandable, but limiting visibility for viewers? That’s a serious misstep that results in a frustrating and inefficient experience for Figma users.

Love the feature.  Hate how it was rolled out. Viewers must be able to see annotations. If this isn't a bug, then it's an extremely short-sighted decision, possibly a misguided attempt at monetization.

As someone working for a SaaS company, most of my viewers are internal stakeholders—sales teams, product managers, and executives—none of whom are developers. Expecting them to become developers just to fully understand a project is absurd. And for those working with external clients, this issue is even more frustrating. Under the current setup, you'd have to grant a client developer access just so they can see project annotations, which makes no sense.

While component-based annotations and comments provide a workaround, they are a poor substitute. This approach is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t result in additional charges just to let people see how something is supposed to function. Restricting annotation creation to full and developer subscriptions is understandable, but limiting visibility for viewers? That’s a serious misstep that results in a frustrating and inefficient experience for Figma users.

bump

This ability to create the most useful and useless feature at the same time, is brilliant. Did Figma end up being bought by Adobe? It seems so. Annotations visible to everyone... for YESTERDAY!

In which plans can annotations be viewed? Our team members with 'can view' access can't see my annotations, only the colored numbers.

You need a full or a dev seat in any paid plan to see them