You don't need tools to design great things
At Eclipse it’s almost impossible to go a whole day without using Figma for something. Which makes sense, at the time I write this in early 2025 you could argue that Figma has become the industry standard for any kind of interface design, maybe digital design in general with some reports giving it an 80% market share
No tool lasts forever
This isn’t that surprising for a product that keeps growing its feature set. As a designer I’d have to have a compelling reason to want to leave the walled garden of Figma
But it’s important to leave that garden and remember Figma is just a tool and the thing about tools is they get old, or they break. Before I used Figma I used Sketch, before that Adobe XD, if I go back far enough a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. They were all great tools, until there was something to replace them. Software can go away. Something I’m sure anyone who’s recently had their Invision account closed could understand. Or maybe the XD user noticed that the updates and then the support dried up once Adobe tried to buy Figma.
Preparation is key
I’m obviously not saying that the design tool you use is not important. A good tool makes things easier and faster. The difficult part can be resisting the urge to start designing too soon. This is something that is increasingly difficult to do when there are now AI tools that will generate working prototypes in minutes. It can feel counterintuitive to slow down the process. But the question that no tool will be able to answer is “Am I designing the right thing?” That is the essence of my point, great design doesn’t need tools to succeed, it needs preparation. Or to quite the much more succinct Benjamin Franklin; “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”
Good design is about solving problems. It’s very difficult to solve the right problem if you don’t take the time to ask the right questions. That means talking to your stakeholders, getting input from users, current or potential. It means taking the time to gather whatever data is at your disposal, to help you identify the problems that exist and then clearly defining the ones you’re going to try and solve. In short, the “what” is never as important as the “why”. We had a client not too long ago that wanted to increase the number of users signing up for a sales call back. They came to us with lots of ideas about a product they knew inside out but weren’t sure where to start. By making the time for user testing sessions we were able to discover our “why” directly from users. They told us they wanted more detailed product information. Ultimately, we were able to drive more signups by simply making the product sections on the landing page link to case studies and detailed product information that already existed but were hard to find. Making the time to find the right problem meant we could build a more effective solution for users and our client
Discover what works
Fundamentally, nothing about discovering your “why”, needs to involve any kind of tool, except maybe a pen and paper and the odd sticky note. Digital tools aren’t inherently bad, and I’m not a luddite, work in the way that is most productive to you. But every tool comes with additional choices and options and potential for complexity. The difficult thing is to remove as many barriers as possible to uncover your “why”.
The design process will accumulate complexity as it progresses, and in my experience, you’ll be fighting a losing battle trying to stop it. So, pick your battles and remove as many options, choices and distractions as you can. Because it’s a lot easier to start simply than try and make something simple later. That process could be a FigJam board or a pile of sticky notes; the tools are unimportant. What is important, and what makes great design possible, is making the time and space to find out why you’re designing something. If you need some help discovering what your process looks like, you can always reach out to our Experience team, we’d love to help.
