Mastery of Figma's Text Language a PM Differentiator
A guide to Figma's text language suggests that product managers who understand its system for design tokens are better equipped for design collaboration. Embedding consistency in text styles, responsive layouts, and accessibility checks upfront can reduce downstream bugs and improve UI consistency.
- Design tokens act as the single source of truth for all visual design elements by storing reusable properties like colors, typography, and spacing. This allows a change in one central location to automatically apply across all designs, ensuring consistency. - A product manager with a background in customer support can uniquely leverage their deep understanding of customer pain points to inform the creation and evolution of a design system. This ensures the system is built to address known user frustrations and can lead to more intuitive product development. - The implementation of a design system can lead to significant efficiencies in development. For instance, a case study on Airbnb demonstrated a 75% reduction in the time needed to build a new page. Salesforce also reported a 50% decrease in redundant code after adopting their design system. - Design systems are instrumental in upholding accessibility standards. By incorporating WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) into design tokens for color contrast, font sizes, and spacing, teams can ensure products are usable for people with diverse abilities. - For global products, design tokens can streamline the management of multilingual user interfaces. By creating distinct "modes" for different languages, designers can effortlessly switch between translations to preview and adjust layouts for various text lengths. - A product manager plays a vital role in the governance of a design system, which involves defining the roles and responsibilities of designers, developers, and other stakeholders. Their responsibilities also include prioritizing the system's roadmap to align with broader company objectives. - The success of a design system can be quantified using key performance indicators (KPIs) such as its adoption rate across teams, the measured reduction in UI bugs, and overall improvements in team productivity. - A well-documented design system can significantly reduce the onboarding time for new team members. Atlassian, for instance, cut the onboarding time for new designers by 40% by providing them with a clear set of guidelines and reusable components.
