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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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.
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!
+1 on this request. My whole team outside of just my FE eng need to see the annotations so that thye can understand functionality. if it’s not viewable by all then I have to make my own annotations anyways which wastes more of my time and defeats the whole purpose of making the handoff process faster.
+1, this is extremely frustrating. It’s a great tool, but it loses impact when you can’t share with the larger team.
Agree with everyone here. There is absolutely no point having annotations if I can’t share them with the wider team. Figma team, please pull your socks up, stop being another money grubbing corporation and make this an actually useful feature - make annotations visible to everyone!
I’ve never posted before, but this is a HUGE miss by Figma! I was excited to see annotations as a new feature, but if those with view only accounts cannot see them, then this feature is worthless. Stakeholders need to be able to see annotations, not just designers and developers. Looks like I’ll be going back to the old way of annotating until this oversight is fixed.
+1 Just presented an annotated design the a customer and am about to share it with them. That’ll be a nice surprise for them that they cannot see the annotations they just saw.
Please consider making annotations available for everyone.
The most infuriating part of this is that when the feature was introduced 2 months ago, it was visible by all. Was there an announcement that the feature would be restricted? I was just in a design review with a dev team where I found out, live on their screen, that my extensive annotations were impossible for them to view. I agree with others that this is less than useless: if I knew the annotations could not be viewed, I would have annotated the way I always have before.
Even if my org wanted to pay for developer seats, there’s no time to coordinate that in sprint. They need the annotations now. I shouldn’t even be writing this now, I need to hurry up and transfer all of my annotations out of Annotations, so my dev team can continue working.
I am so profoundly frustrated and disappointed with Figma right now.
This is awful. I just spent a full day annotating 2 different files with hundreds of contextual notes, so not for development, but for stakeholders, copywriting team, and more - just to learn only edit/dev see annotations?
“Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least “can view” access to a file can view measurements and annotations”. What kind of a purposefully false-advertising language is this?! Especially since the feature isn’t locked behind a dev mode switch, it’s next to comments WHICH ARE AVAILABLE TO ALL.
Horrible. Useless. Frustrating. Disappointing.
Every few days you manage to surprise me negatively, lately. Actively looking for alternatives now, no joke.
I just today realized the same. At least 5 different projects that I worked on in parallel, loaded with annotations, now turned out to be hidden behind a paywall….
Unbelievable how unclear and misleading you were about introduction and further improvements of that tool, shame.
This is fcking ridiculous. I’d spent hours to specify design parts and behaviors for my Manager and Stakeholders, and I was shocked when I saw on my manager’s screen only edit/dev seats can see the annotations. Purchasing a full seat just to see these annotations is frustrating, and watching Figma transforming from a free product into one that tries to invent ways to make money from even the tiniest features is deeply disappointing.
AGREED!
I came here for the first time just to say this! I was so excited about not having to manually set up annotations anymore—being able to click directly on an element and add an annotation with a label is a huge time-saver.
However, it's a major limitation that people with “View Only” access can’t see them.
Our backend developers and QA engineers are in Figma all the time, but they only need view access. That said, they still need to see annotations like notes, tooltips, and links just as much as our frontend developers do. Upgrading all of them to dev seats would be prohibitively expensive.
This feature would be so much more useful if annotations were visible to view-only users too.Needless to say, we won’t be able to use the annotations feature till it is available to all users.
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.
I’m also sooo frustrated to only find out about this now! I spent hours writing annotations for our devs who had View seats only to find out today that they can’t see them! And how did I find out? The devs kept asking questions in the past couple of days when the answers to them were already written in the annotations. So I was already starting to wonder if annotations can only be seen by me. Then LO AND BEHOLD! After searching on google, this thread came up.
Figma, please do something about this. It’s ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS to only let Dev and Editor seats see annotations.
The problem we’re having is that annotations don’t show up for paid editors when the file is set to view only. They’re only visible in Dev Mode.
Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least can view access to a file can view measurements and annotations
We have the exact same problem! Our PM is not able to see annotations, which is crucial as that’s where we add some of the specifications of the design.
I’m absolutely tilted over this. It’s one things to set specific permissions around a feature, another to NOT EXPLICITLY COMMUNICATE THOSE PERMISSION-RELATED RESTRICTIONS TO USERS. My dev team noticed that it was atypical of me to not leave annotations (I had previously used widgets to do so), and that’s how I found out Figma annotations are not visible to users with View seats.
