Hello! FigJam is very exciting, my colleagues and I gave it a test drive last night during the announcement and we had lots of fun.
Something I felt almost right off the bat is a need for a more permanent commenting solution that doesn’t involve slapping stickies on the board (due to how much space they consume and how quickly they can clutter the space).
FigJam has very good support for stamps and emotes, and the cursor “text” emote is very good for quick conversations (though I sometimes find it hard to follow or see comments on time), but when it comes to more permanent and self-contained comments, FigJam seems quite limited.
I discovered that Figma’s commenting functionality survived the transition to FigJam in a fairly unchanged fashion, and I personally think there’s a lot of potential for improvement there. Here are some of my thoughts:
- You can open the comments panel by pressing C, but when you do all your other keyboard shortcuts (most notably E for emotes) stop working. I’d love to be able to switch between the two seamlessly or even emote with the comments panel left open.
- Comments in FigJam are hidden unless you open the comments panel. This automatically makes them a second-class citizen in an environment where everything that actually matters is displayed right on the canvas.
- The comment “pin” shown on the canvas would work very well if it had the same behavior as a stamp on the canvas: permanent, always visible, and interactive on click. Sure, comments can quickly clutter up a space and we know this from using Figma, but if comments were rendered exactly like stamps (including retaining their size instead of scaling with the viewport) I think they’d work well as a first-class citizen
- This is an issue I’ve suffered from in Figma too but it becomes more painful in FigJam: I think comments should be pinned to the layer they were originally created on. For example, if I add a sticky or a component instance to FigJam, then add a comment, then move the original layer around, I would expect the comment to move around with it. If that doesn’t happen, a canvas may get messy very quickly.
These are my thoughts. I couldn’t see any other post talking about comments so I hope this isn’t a repetition of something that’s already been discussed. Thanks!