Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

[aaronjellis]

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.

[dvaliao]

Hey @aaronjellis, thanks for the feedback!

We’ll pass this onto the Dev Mode team for future consideration.

[Mikka_Wild_adesso]

This is also a major impediment for our team in using the native annotations in Figma, since we also need the other roles (PM, PO, QA etc.) to see annotated content- and function-related but not technical data.

@dvaliao
Other impediments with the annotations we have are:

Branch for updating Dev Mode Annotation

Hi Community & Figma team, we are using branching to keep track of changes in files. Furthermore, we would like to use the Dev Mode annotations. However we noticed, that it is not possible to merge a branch that only has changes to annotations. However, this is necessary in case a ticket of us only contains changes to document for developer resources linking etc. Would it be possible to see changes also as changes to the file to be able to track & branch them properly? All the best Mikka

Risk of loosing dev mode annotations

Hi Figma Community & Team, one issue we have with using the dev mode annotations is that it is very easy to accidentally delete annotations which are attached to design layers when changing a design. We would need some more security in annotations not disappearing with the design elements, to store important information in them for the devs. Also it would be great to be able to move and attach them to other design elements when changing something. Best regards Mikka

[dvaliao]

Thanks for chiming in and providing additional feedback, @Mikka_Wild_adesso!

I’ll make sure the Dev Mode team also has eyes on those topics.