Last year my team made the decision to try switching our complex Sketch + Abstract + Invision flow for Figma. Working in a team with multiple designers, product managers, developers, copywriters, and more stakeholders than I can remember, Figma keeps us all working in sync. The collaborative design tool is getting praise for all the right reasons and while it does many things very well, I’ve rounded up my top 10 features I’d love to see them roll out.

1. Incognito mode

Please let me hide my cursor from others, I’m shy. While it’s possible to hide other users’ cursors, sometimes I really don’t want mine to be shown or show that I’m online.

2. Improve text-box behaviour

I’m pretty disappointed Figma text-boxes don’t work the same way as Sketch, it’s not a dealbreaker but it is frustrating. When adjusting text alignment, Figma doesn’t retain where the origin anchor was set (where you clicked) and instead always keeps the origin as the visual top-left, making the text-alignment property pretty useless (adjusting these does absolutely nothing to inline text). In the above gif, you can see how Sketch moves the text-box origin so the text-alignment (left/right/centre) of the text box is anchored to where the text-box was initially placed. This is a behaviour crafted around designer intent rather than purist engineering. It’s also particularly useful if you are creating a new text-box and have the wrong alignment set as default as it sets your brand new box in the right place. — please fix it!

I also have an intermittent bug that when the font size is larger than a text-box created with a single click, Figma instantly de-selects it. It’s hard to replicate it exactly, but I often find empty text-boxes littered around my document with nothing in them.

3. HTML embeds

Prototyping in Figma is pretty basic, but for what most teams use it for it does the job. Some of the more nuanced interactions though are difficult to replicate, such as onboarding videos or maps. I’d love to see HTML embeds in prototypes to unlock the potential of this tool. Imagine being able to test with videos, maps, and custom components such as forms. I’m not expecting Framer Team level of coding, but adding some dynamic elements could dramatically improve prototyping and I’d be interested to see the creative uses such a feature would open up.

4. Sticky background on scroll / z-index controls

Fix position on scroll forces objects to the front

Figma already lets you fix a navigation bar, but the scrollable elements must always sit behind. This makes it hard to place a fixed background for example or replicate a parallax effect. It would be great to have finer control over the display order of these elements and allow more complex scrolling behaviour with multiple layers.

5. Better arrow interface

Changing arrowheads is not very intuitive

Sketch struggles here too, but can we please have different arrowheads, sizes and have an easy way to change the caps? This menu is not very intuitive to use and it’s hidden away making it difficult for even the best designers to create arrows using the first-hand tools. It’s even led to some interesting workarounds like https://www.figma.com/resources/assets/flow-arrows/.

6. Status tracking

These artboards have the same names but are at very different stages of the design process. It’s often difficult for teams to know what’s ready, what’s in progress and even who’s assigned to what. Our team has some interesting work-arounds but building in or integrating some form of project management would be game-changing for a design tool. Let me see what artboards are ready for review, help our development team understand what’s “ready”, and our product managers track progress.

7. Annotation mode

It’s hard to capture design rationale, comments don’t quite fit the bill here as they’re intended to be for feedback and resolved. A dedicated annotation mode for documentation would make developer handover much easier and even help designers capture and communicate thoughts in one place.

8. Print

We love doing design reviews on printed out screens but this process is particularly painful. I’d love to see the ability to print artboards directly from Figma and even print the artboards with comments/annotations.

Figma could easily take on print design tools

There’s also a broader question about whether it makes sense for Figma to also service print designers… The whole print design industry has been neglected in favour of digital design tools and it wouldn’t take much for Figma to adapt for print design and really lead this space.

9. PDF invoices

Figma’s invoicing feels like one of those well intended features that got built without asking the users that actually need invoices. Every month when I expense back the charge, the beautiful, unique, and annoyingly HTML invoices can’t be attached to corporate expense software. Please keep it simple and just email the bill as a PDF so users don’t have to go hunting through the billing and account settings to take a screenshot.

10. Plugin shortcuts + concurrency

Currently, Figma does not allow multiple plugins to run at the same time

I’m loving the plugin community around Figma but wish that developers could get access to keyboard shortcuts and that plugins could run at the same time. I understand this is a monumental engineering task but Sketch for-better-or-worse has made it work and plugins such as https://sketchrunner.com/ have transformed design workflow. Some plugins also make sense to run-in the background (e.g. spell-check), so maybe this is the next iteration of plugin capabilities.