Let us FIGJAM

On April 2021, at Config 2021, Figma’s virtual design conference, Figma CEO Dylan Field announced the launch of FigJam, a new collaborative whiteboarding space for teams to ideate and brainstorm together. As of now, FigJam is in public beta so it is completely free for unlimited usage. However, in 2022 there will be a Starter plan, which will still include FigJam in the free Starter plan.

FigJam

FigJam immediately gained traction among the design community since Figma is already being used extensively in organizations and an offering like this was bound to create the noise of the disruption Figma will create in the collaboration software market.

The Collaboration Software Market

While FigJam is still in beta, it has a lot of potential to give competition to the already existing software in this space.

Market Size

1. Collaboration Software Market: $13.44b
2. Virtual Whiteboarding Tool Software Market: $2.31b

Source: Fortune Business Insights (US)

Direct Competitors

Miro, Whimsical, Notion, Mural, Cacoo, Lucidchart, Draw.io.

Total Addressable Market based on ICPs

Product Managers, Product Designers, Marketing Managers, Founders, Program Managers

Competitors

1. Miro

Users: 15 million

What users like?

1. Intuitive and easy to use for non-designers.
2. Readymade templates to get started quickly.
3. Kanban boards and import from spreadsheets.
4. Integrations with a variety of tools to create an ecosystem.
5. Custom templates.

What users don’t like?

1. Price Model.
2. Cannot share boards and templates within multiple teams and products.
3. Font / Color customization not that great.
4. Lacks prototyping support.

2. Whimsical

Users: _ _

What users like?

1. Variety of formatting options and customizations for seamless designs.
2. Templates for flows, diagrams, and mind maps.
3. It requires almost no learning curve.

What users don’t like?

1. Cannot connect flows into actual wireframes created in a prototyping application.
2. The export file is not vectorial and is just .png.
3. It can get a bit slow when working with a lot of images.
4. Should be able to change the font size and type and not just mention S/M/L

User Research

User Segmentation

Based on Role: Product Managers, Product Designers, Marketing Managers, Program Managers, Founders.

Based on Activity

1. Power Users: more than 1 hour every day OR 4–5 times a week
2. Core Users: 3–4 times a week
3. Casual Users: 1–2 times a month

What is primarily used for Research/Ideation other than whiteboard tools:

1. Google/Microsoft Suite (Word, Slides, Excel)
2. Notion
3. Kanban boards and other agile tools

Figma Revolution

The Product Roadmap is a complex process with numerous goalposts. Traditionally there is a gap between initial ideation and the final design process, majorly because both of these steps are executed on different platforms. With FigJam coming into the picture, there is a possibility of filling in the gaps between the ideation by expanding horizontally across the entire flow since Figma has already established itself as a worthy design tool for a majority of organizations.

What I look forward to?

#1 Persona-based Delivery

Figma is traditionally a design tool primarily used by Product Designers to create prototypes and mockups and give shape to the ideation. With the introduction of FigJam, the landscape of Figma changes since it now needs to cater to stakeholders other than Designers and so the use case can vary drastically.

User flow of Miro and Mural, respectively

• A similar framework is followed by these collaborating tools to better understand the user’s needs during onboarding in order to set up their workspace. This is because, as mentioned above, the customer segmentation of these collaborative tools is diverse and so are the use cases.
• Secondly, since the majority of users using FigJam will possibly be non-designers, it is essential to give them a starting point in the form of pre-built templates and components(other than community ones) based on use cases as filled above.

Suggested homepage for Figma

The same shapes/templates can be provided inside the workspace files to give a headstart without pulling in major manual work, especially for non-designers.

#2 Integrations

Figma can prove to be a game-changer in this context because it is already adopted by a large number of organizations as a primary design tool. Hence, integrating FigJam in the entire product roadmap flow will help gain Figma a place like none before. This will help establish Figma as a one-stop solution for all product needs.

Internal Integration

1. Currently, you can copy mockups from design files to paste in FigJam boards. While this in itself is great, to further smoothen the process, the copied designs can be linked and synced to the parent design file to look out for some changes reflected and also to be redirected to the parent file.
2. The designers can be nudged to invite members to brainstorm the design iterations on FigJam boards. This can be a potential referral inside a product team to onboard new members. Power/Core users can be taken advantage of to bring on their team to collaborate.
3. A common presentation mode including both design and FigJam files to present the consolidated work and targets achieved for every sprint/product delivery. Similar to how Figma has been used by people for presentations. This is an opportunity to convert casual users to core/power users.
4. The components featured in FigJam include the stickers posted by the community members. The same can be leveraged to include the custom design components made by designers within a Figma Project to these FigJam jamboards to have an efficient feedback loop.

Although FigJam and Figma Design files cater to two separate personas, a strong integration between the two can streamline the entire horizontal flow from ideation to design to feedback such that although the entry files are different yet individually it consolidates the entire journey.

3rd party Integration

1. Syncing and embedding pre-existing document files(word, PPT, Excel) to onboard members without any hassle. If any previous product stickiness or dependency exists, users are likely to postpone the onboarding but with such an integration casual users can be activated to core users.
2. Slack integrations to notify teams of any changes or comments added to the FigJam files. This will essentially loop in members to have a look at the files even though they might not be contributing directly.
3. Exporting or integrating with apps like Notion to prepare a report on the ideation and brainstorming process. To document the entire process, certain snapshots of the boards at different times can be saved to reiterate and retrospect the entire brainstorming process.

Ending Notes

FigJam definitely seems like a pivot for the collaboration market which has been in trend ever since people are working from home. With such a tool, Figma has opened the door for more user personas in the setup and creators alike. With such a strong community and amazing patrons of Figma, this surely will be seen surging to places.