My team has encountered some issues working with non-designers that would be really helpful to fix if Slides and Buzz had a few more features they could access. Listing below the features that I think should exist in both Design mode and Slides/Buzz mode:
- Layers Panel
- Our users have trouble navigating auto layouts we create, especially when there are multiple nested within each other or within a group. Having access to the layers panel to select, remove, duplicate or lock/unlock objects would be really helpful for them
- If there was a way for designers to lock objects with certain permissions (i.e. can change the text but can’t change the X,Y positions, can move the object but can’t resize it, can unlock some objects but not others), that would help us maintain design control while still providing flexibility for non-designers
- Our users have trouble navigating auto layouts we create, especially when there are multiple nested within each other or within a group. Having access to the layers panel to select, remove, duplicate or lock/unlock objects would be really helpful for them
- Position/Layout Settings
- Users in Slides/Buzz mode don’t have a way to manually set Width, Height or Rotation controls. Given that these controls are available in platforms like Powerpoint and Canva, many users are comfortable with these and are frustrated having to eyeball some sizing and position settings
- Object/Slide Exporting
- Slides/Buzz users are unable to export individual objects (like images) as well as individual pages. At times, they want to save an image that’s been added to a deck or Buzz template and need to ask a designer to do it for them. Our team also has had to use individual slide exports as a workaround for PDFing since the export-to-PDF functionality in Figma is producing low-quality files that are too large for email and look worse with compression -- we want to empower people to be able to export their individual slides as PNGs or JPGs and combine those files into a PDF to ensure we maintain quality and file size
- More Dynamic Appearance/Effect Controls
- Slides/Buzz users have limited functionality with appearance/effects and are only able to add/remove borders from all 4 sides of a frame, round all 4 corners of a frame, and use 3 presets for shadows. This has particularly been an issue when we use custom border settings on frames to create tables -- non-designers are not able to apply lines to only the top and bottom of the frames as we would prefer and instead end up breaking auto-layouts to add lines as objects, resulting in more work for us to go back and fix the tables we set up
- This is another thing that would be great for the designers to control -- if we could limit which effects they see and how they apply them while still allowing them to make necessary tweaks on their own, that would help reduce frustrations all around
- Slides/Buzz users have limited functionality with appearance/effects and are only able to add/remove borders from all 4 sides of a frame, round all 4 corners of a frame, and use 3 presets for shadows. This has particularly been an issue when we use custom border settings on frames to create tables -- non-designers are not able to apply lines to only the top and bottom of the frames as we would prefer and instead end up breaking auto-layouts to add lines as objects, resulting in more work for us to go back and fix the tables we set up
Overall, it’s been hard to empower our non-designers to create things on their own since they have such limited functionality, and non-designers are frustrated with not having some of these basic controls that they’re used to having in other platforms