The three-year-old digital whiteboarding tool from collaborative interface design startup Figma will provide users new ways to personalize their work environment and make brainstorming process more enjoyable.
A number of new enhancements to its FigJam whiteboarding product have been unveiled by Figma. Figma is the company behind the internet-based, interactive user interface program of exact the same name. These updates include additional templates and connectors that are intended to boost productivity and make teamwork more enjoyable.
FigJam, a spinoff tool introduced in April 2021 to enable user dialogues and collaboration efforts on the Figma platform, promises to facilitate brainstorming via workflows and simple visuals.
The firm has observed teams using FigJam for nearly everything concerning holding team routines to planning, brainstorming, and diagramming, according to Jillian Latimer, the marketing product manager at FigJam. As Figma started to grow into the whiteboarding sector, the business noticed teams that wouldn't be traditional Figma clients utilize the platform.
"We actually view FigJam as a discussion board, a platform where it's not only ideation or sketching being experienced, but also where teams establish ideas, reach aggreement on decisions, and finally drive plans ahead, all of it in a single place," she added. During the course of the product development process, "it turns into this platform where participants are free to interact in conversations, work together, and come up with an agreed - upon foundation for collaboration."
According to Latimer, the business wanted to put its attention on increasing productivity and enabling teams to remain more aligned from the initial idea to the finished product.
Teams can standardize their workflow thanks to the creation of new custom templates that make it easy to reuse existing ones and generate templates that everyone in a team can use. FigJam's latest partnerships with products made by UserTesting, a company that makes client feedback program, and Productboard, a company that makes collaboration tools, are meant to let businesses import conversations they are having in those products straight into FigJam. Additionally, a new widget will allow users to convert stickied ideas into Productboard notes.
The company's core values, which place a heavy focus on fun and playfulness, gave birth to the other new features.
By enabling users to define and distribute elements to their fellow members with team face stamps and to respond to other people's ideas with emojis in its most recent set of platform improvements, FigJam has aimed to push this aspect of fun even further. In order to create areas that are more customized, businesses are also going to able to make their brand colors the default for files.
Users will have the opportunity to able to select from a number of pre-programmed tracks of music that will be playing for a predetermined amount of duration when they are working on a project. Users can manage their personal volume levels and can mute the track for themselves, but that exact track will keep playing across every user in the file. Anyone with access to the file can choose or modify a track of music.
In order to make FigJam a bit more human, Latimer said they are actually seeking for ways we can do that and want to distinguish ourselves from others and void of a paper document.
Adobe announced in September 2022 that it would buy Figma for $20 billion, but the deal has run into a number of regulatory roadblocks, including an inquiry by the European Commission and the Competition and Markets Authority of the United Kingdom (CMA)."Figma's web-based, multiplayer platform will speed up the delivery of Adobe's Creative Cloud services on the internet, thus making the process of creation accessible to more people," said David Wadhwani, the Adobe executive vice president, at the time the deal was announced.