Our product team of developers, designers, and writers has now worked with Figma successfully for a while. However, we still have one major issue concerning the shared URLs:
When developing a new feature, we start working out concepts in Figma which are shared at a very early and rough stage with the team via URL in Slack and are attached to the corresponding Jira-Tickets. The concepts go through various iterations, alternatives, and critiques before being “done”. When things seem to be ready I (as the maintainer of the Figma project) clean the file and move the artboard into our “Main” collection.
This leads to the issue, that when moving and pasting artboards around (e.g. from a “work-in-progress” page to the “ready for implementation” page, the shared URLs get broken. When someone wants to access a particular artboard from Jira (e.g. our Tester who usually compares screens when already implemented) the links do not work anymore.
Is there a good way to deal with this issue? Shifting from artboard links to page links (which would require restructuring the hierarchies of the document)? Avoiding moving the artboards between pages?
Do you experience similar challenges? How do you maintain your URLs while having artboards in different stages spread across multiple pages?
How do you move frames between pages? I don’t know if that will fix the issue but if you are doing Ctrl + X, Ctrl + V, try doing Right click → Move to page… instead, the IDs of objects won’t change thus the links should technically stay the same, but I’m not 100% sure.
great, this already solves some of the issues. Doing some research I found this summary of how elements can be moved around currently - maybe it helps to understand the restrictions when setting up design workflows and structures:
Project
∟ File <= can move to different parent
∟ Page <= CAN’T move to different parent
∟ Frame <= can move to different parent
Moving tickets from one page (InProgress) to another (Done) in Figma is a bit out of our way having to right click, move, then find the mockup and align it to the desired location on the page. It would be much easier to just cut it (CMD+X), switch pages and paste it whenever we need—cut frames shouldn’t lose their links nor comments attached to them.
Another (more of a team workflow) issue I kept running into was the linked frame to Jira. We used to link the first frame of the flow to the Jira design ticket as soon as we start iterating over it so engineers can jump in, see the progress and have an open door. But many times we shuffle the frames around in the flow and the linked (first) frame gets replaced sometimes. With this we are also losing the link to Jira ticket.
My workaround I just adapted to solve this: Start every flow with a keyframe (cover frame showing the number of the Jira ticket) that never changes and have it linked to Jira instead of linking the first (or any other) frame in the flow that is vulnerable to be replaced.
And of course when moving from page to page we gotta use the “move” feature. But again, it would be stellar to keep the links upon cut (CMD+X).
We have tried locking the handoff frames, that are always the final version. I just lock the shell elements and frame. The actual content is not locked, nor is it a sub of the frame in layers panel.
To make modifications, I copy the content to another page, do our iteration process. When approved, I move the content back on-top of the locked frame. The URL for the locked frame thus never changes so QA, Tickets, etc. can always reference via that one url back to the handoff content.