Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

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.