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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+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.
This feature would be a game changer if everyone including those who are view access only, we have so many people who need to be able to view annotations but this feature is essentially unusable now since the entire team needs to be able to view them, not just designers and devs.
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.
I truly don’t understand why annotations needs to be behind a paid seat. It seems like most other organization here has made annotations as part of their dev hand off process. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience to the user but a huge disruption to an entire process at an organization. I do hope that Figma does reconsider making annotations available for anyone who just wants to view the wireframes.
+1
Honestly, If my annotations can’t been seen by anyone i share with or give at least view access, I will not use these annotations. It would be a waste of time to only talk to one person when its very much a full team effort.
This is disgusting money-grubbing behaiviour Figma team. Annotations are useless if they’re behind a paid seat. Please open them to all, or don’t bother having them. Incredibly disappointed that the company is ignoring user needs and just trying to make as much money as possible. Another Adobe in the making. Users will abandon you if you don’t actually provide a good experience.;
This isn’t just a minor inconvenience to the user but a huge disruption to an entire process at an organization.
That quote is perfect.
Esta hermosa funcionalidad, y muy útil por cierto, sólo puede ser visualizada por personas dentro del mismo TEAM, pero a veces trabajamos Diseñadores separados del equipo de desarrolladores y no los tenemos incluidos dentro del mismo TEAM.
Con lo cual esta funcionalidad de comunicación no nos sirve. Sería genial que estas Anotaciones que nos permite categorizar, pudiera ser compartida. Me gusta utilizarla para explicar temas de contenido adicionales o interacciones que debe realizar y que no siempre se pueden diseñar.
En mi caso trabajo con muchas funcionalidades de Sistemas muy complejos y las anotaciones me resultan muy útiles para documentar ciertos procesos. Esta documentación es necesaria compartirla con DESARROLLADORES, pero también con Product Owners, Funcionales, Manager etc. Más aún si quien desarrolla no está dentro del equipo. Cómo podríamos hacer para que se pueda compartir en la opción de VIEW y no sólo en EDIT. Gracias!
This is great! Thank you very much! Also measurment
It has made my life so much easier. I was using a plugin earlier for putting sticky notes everywhere for developers now this has become easier.
It is absolutely absurd that user’s without a full or eng seat can’t see annotations. I have PM users who just view files (or have figjam seats) and the annotations are useful for them as well. Feels like a money-grab by Figma. Very disappointing
+1 !!
Now that they are available to add in the design mode and have different tags for different teams, I figured they would be visible to all, but was mistaken. Please make this happen!
Hey All, thank you for flagging this!
The team confirmed that this isn’t expected behavior. Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least can view access to a file should be able to view measurements and annotations.
Our team is working on a fix, and we’ll provide an update as soon as we can.
