Problem
For most of activity on #friends-of-figma Dicord in #FigmaHelp channel and #get-help forum category — you need more context on what Figma users are struggling with.
Sometimes it’s a bug, but for majority of time it’s not.
Challenges I have seen Figma users face:
- Even if Figma Team and community is placing great effort in producing support materials in written and video form — sometimes you don’t know what to look for. And you don’t have time to play Google guru. 🕵️♂️
- Having complex components or prototype situations that require specific usage of Figma features is getting more common. Truly understanding mechanics of Auto Layout and instance overrides would help immensely. Unfortunately, sometimes people need to do their work in time sensitive manner and don’t spend required time to learn it properly. Even when resources are easily available.
- There is still low awareness of Figma Hacks like 0 height AL, slots method or to make it short — anything from Figma - Pushing Figma to its limits | A lot of inspiring techniques presented at Config 2021. All of them became real only because of t... — kudos to everyone involved!
- Trying solutions but getting stuck and not seeing what is wrong with your implementation.
In most of those cases users reach out for help.
Sometimes pasting a link to publicly available resource is more than enough. 🥳
However, there are lot of instances where it’s hard to explain in written words what is expected behaviour, what are you trying to achieve, where is the problem and what solutions have you tried.
For those situations file access is needed.
If you are on Organisation plan it’s unlikely you will share any files openly with community, having Team plan makes it easier but still if your organisation is “tight” on policies you might avoid the trouble. Especially if you need to share edit rights so some one can jump in and show you solution to the problem.
Yes — creating a new team and adding files there is a solution — but nobody want’s to do that. And the only way to share files with edit rights is to share it in Team/Org space. And then you start seeing “unfamiliar” faces in your admin panel. You might forget to revoke edit access… things can happen.
And people do get stuck and desperate so they create files and we share links in DMs. Then they have to revoke access latter, delete team spaces… you get the point.
Possible Solution
Easier “Sharing & learning” environment for broader Figma community.
"Constrained space solution"
Add ability to “share” edit rights for files / projects with people form community for free.
But make that space time constrained — it auto deletes after some time. 🔥💣
Most of thing get resolved in 2-3 days and require 1-3 people involved. So “temp Figma spaces” for this would extremely useful for this use case and possibly even more!
Example Flow:
- Create “temp space” to collaborate.
- Copy/Paste specific components or assets in that space
- Share space with people willing to help
- Copy solution or just take away what you learned in pure knowledge form
- Destroy the space
- or leave it be and it will “self-destruct” in x time — deleting everything for ever.
- Repeat
"Constrained share permission solution"
Guess this would be possible as well — sharing something for limited amount of time for free — like granting someone access to files for 2 days. But I can see how this could be abused and complicates the sharing mechanics too much. Also complicates the billing and “seats” logic.
Also the “self destroying playground” sound more fun 🤣 🔫
I had more than 10 files shared in last few weeks — trying to help fellow designers to solve their Figma worries. Most of them successfully. Having this feature would make this process faster, spending less time setting up sharing spaces and more time helping each-other out.
Am I missing something?
Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there another way, better way of solving this type of situations without having to open new Figma teams, creating files and then deleting them after?
P.S. If some one has a name for this type of space feel free to share 😉