Over the last year collaborating with product and design teams has become challenging.
The traditional use of whiteboards, post-it notes and having physical meetings became near about impossible, as team members started working from their homes.
While in some countries people are now able to get back to offices, one thing is clear: remote work is here to stay. Teams will be more distributed and communication will likely be more asynchronous.
For design teams, this has led to the swift adoption of platforms that make visual collaboration easy. From ideation to research to mapping user flows to brainstorming to providing feedback, these tools hold a lot of promise.
Figma is a design tool that too has seen swift adoption. But it lacked a ‘white board’ and true collaboration features.
While one could provide design feedback via comments, view team mates via cursors, it always meant there was the need for ‘another tool’ to truly collaborate on the fly.
Last week, Figma announced a whole host of features focused on collaboration, at it Config 2021 event. Key among them was FigJam: a product focussed purely on collaborative brainstorming.
In this challenge, you need to compare FigJam with it competitors to find 2 key areas of product improvement. You also need to justify why these are the two improvements that are needed.
The suggestions could be new feature additions to FigJam or improvements to existing features, but must be based on your analysis of competitors.
Ultimately, your goal is to get non-Figma users to start using Figma and also help retain existing Figma users.
Please note:
- The improvements have to be product improvements. Hence, suggestions related to better pricing , better distribution and such are not valid.
- It makes sense to do primary research with designers, especially design leads/decision makers, to get a deeper understanding of customer and user needs. This will likely help you focus on actual needs rather than cool sounding features/improvements. Bonus points for solid primary research.
- You are free to also suggest new features, but they should be based on something that you see a competitor doing well
- The suggestions need to be impactful: hence minor improvements, which maybe related to usability, should be avoided. This is especially important, since FigJam is in Beta
