Craft is the connector: FigJam updates that empower the whole team

From engineers to marketers, a wide variety of roles at different skill levels rely on FigJam for online collaboration and whiteboarding—so it’s crucial that it feels intuitive and easy to use. When your tools work with you, you’re able to focus on what matters: brainstorming the next big idea, distilling a concept in a crisp diagram, or rallying your team around a plan. Building on the results of an external benchmarking study, we’ve been prioritizing a series of usability improvements around alignment, connectors, and formatting that help your team get the most out of your FigJams—and get back to your craft.

Easy-to-use is hard to measure

There’s a lot that goes into ease-of-use—not just the major features and functionalities, but also the subtle improvements that you may not be able to articulate but you can definitely feel. These all contribute to your experience using FigJam and to its effectiveness in mapping out a user flow, diagramming your information architecture, or building your product roadmap.

Like all Figma’s products, FigJam is constantly evolving and adding capabilities. Throughout this product development, it’s important that FigJam remains intuitive and friendly for newcomers and experts alike. However, it’s hard to have an objective measure of usability. Metrics only give a high-level snapshot of a specific action, and user feedback can be anecdotal.

Connecting the dots

Recognizing this challenge, Figma worked with MeasuringU, a UX research firm that leveraged the System Usability Scale (SUS), an industry standard for measuring perception of usability. They conducted a longitudinal study measuring FigJam’s ease-of-use relative to other digital tools every six months over a span of two years, and providing recommendations on how to improve. The studies asked professionals who use visual collaboration tools to perform real-world whiteboarding and diagramming tasks and rate different aspects of their experience. “A good benchmarking program involves a mix of task performance and overall attitudinal measures (what people do and what people think) collected at regular intervals before and after new features or design changes are implemented.” Says, Dr. Jeff Sauro, CEO of MeasuringU

While the report showed that FigJam’s usability has improved over time, and is among the best-in-class (ranking in the 95% percentile of digital tools), the latest report identified a series of small but impactful enhancements related to object alignment, connector behavior, and other formatting functionality. Armed with this intel, the FigJam team got to work, and over the last few months, launched seven improvements to help you focus on your craft whether you’re a designer, product manager, developer or any type of collaborator.?

For getting your diagram just right

You can now add connectors anywhere on a shape, so your diagrams can be even more precise.

For making alignment a snap

We fine-tuned the relationship between cursor speed and object snapping so that alignment indicators only appear when you actually need them.

For flow charts that flow

By connecting the center of one shape to another, the cardinal anchor points will automatically choose ones that are the shortest distance between the shapes.

Other improvements include:

• For a cleaner look and feel, there is now more consistent spacing between connectors and shapes regardless of line weight.
• To save you some cursor mileage, we made quick create connectors smarter. They connect to surrounding objects on click, and new shapes adjust connection points to the shortest distance—but you can still tweak them yourself.
• For those using connectors as dividers, objects will now snap nicely to connectors, and connectors will snap to objects.
• For precise color-coding, you can now change the color of the connectors and text independently.

Looking ahead

FigJam’s SUS ranking shows that we’re on the right track. As one research participant states, “[FigJam] was intuitive and everything was laid out in a way that makes sense to me, not like other tools where you spend as much time digging in the tool as you do building.”

While we’re happy to see our SUS ranking improve, we know that every new feature and flow impacts usability. “FigJam’s product roadmap continues to balance new features that will help teams build digital experiences and usability improvements for all collaborators,” says Sophie Kahan, Product Manager for FigJam.?

As more teams turn to FigJam as part of their product development process, these insights ensure that craft remains front and center, whether that means efficiently ideating on what to build or making a polished plan to ensure milestones are met.??

Try out the latest FigJam features today?