Dev mode Measure tool without full Design seat

Hey @Ed_Tramell, sorry to hear you’re having trouble accessing the measure tool!

Since you mentioned that you don’t have or need edit access, my first guess is that you previously had a full seat, which did give you access to the Measure tool.

If you’d like to check any recent permissions changes on the backend, please reach out to the support team directly via this form: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thank you @dvaliao – that at least confirms my suspicion that it’s a permissions issue. My team will have to reevaluate the value that we are (or aren’t) getting out of pure Dev Mode without Edit Access.

Can you explain the rationale, though? I noticed that Annotations also disappeared. This makes sense to me – only someone with edit access (e.g. a designer) would be adding annotations as information for a developer. But as I mentioned for Measure, I don’t understand why the designer would ever add measurements – that’s something the implementer would add as needed. So the permissions seem completely backwards for Measure. Does that make sense?

Thanks for the feedback, @Ed_Tramell!

We hear you. This is definitely something our Dev mode team has gotten before. To advocate on your behalf and guide the team on how we can improve, we’d love to learn more about your specific use case.

If we gave you Measurements, without a full seat:

• Would you want those measurements to show for everyone, or just yourself?
• Would you want those measurements to persist (through page refreshes or leaving and coming back)?

We’ll update your topic into a feature request and pass this feedback onto the Dev mode team!

You’re welcome, @dvaliao – I’m glad the feedback was taken in the spirit it was intended!

For my specific use case on my specific team:

• I would want those measurements to show just for me. I’m implementing a design and trying to be as pixel-faithful as possible, so I add measurements to convert the design into sort of a blueprint to follow. I’m probably the only person on the whole team who needs those measurements for this particular piece of a design. (For anyone else, it would probably just clutter up the design to see my personal measurements.)
• I would definitely want the measurements to persist for the whole time I’m implementing this piece of the design. Mostly because I feel like I don’t have a lot of control over how/when Figma decides to refresh itself (I assume because of app updates or something?). I’d also expect the measurements to still be there if I navigated away and back. (If your developers are worried about the cost of persisting those measurements forever, then maybe there could be an expiration date or something before they get removed. Once I’m done implementing a page/dialog/whatever, I probably won’t ever need those specific measurements again and I could re-add certain ones if needed. But that’s a tricky thing to implement correctly without making some Figma user angry somewhere. 🙂)

Basically – I’d want Measurements to work pretty much exactly how it was working before it disappeared. (Based on what you said in your previous response, I’m still not sure why I had it for a while. But I did, and I used it while it was there. I can still see measurements I added to designs before I lost that ability.)

This is perfect, @Ed_Tramell!

We’ll pass this along to the team to discuss, and in the meantime, don’t forget to also Vote up top! ☝️

We use votes from the community to gauge the overall interest and impact implementing this change could make for all of our users. Thanks again!

I agree it would be very useful to have the interactive Measure tool available for Dev Mode licenses. That way, Developers could measure a design themselves rather than having to go back to their designer to ask for it to be marked up!

I agree with everything ​@Ed_Tramell has said. I equally love using the measurement tool and I believe it to be more of a developer tool than a designer tool so having it available to those with Full Access in Dev Mode makes more sense to me than letting just designers use it.

Would love this feature back without needing Design Mode edit access please and thank you!