Our experiences building a Figma template to sell. Part 2.
After spending a considerable amount of time creating a beautiful, clean and professional set of Figma components (we actually built 120 of them) we decided to stop and review what we had created before selling the template on Gumroad. We then realized the components were not consistent enough and the design system just wasn’t of a high quality… so we hit reset, and it was painful!
We spent weeks re-applying auto-layout to all components and then spent even more time improving the design system so all components had a huge range of variation and flexibility. The buttons and form elements were especially tricky as we wanted to plan for every eventuality such as buttons with icons on the left or right, or form elements with hints or tags.
After we had improved the layouts and design system we then went through every single layer to ensure the wording was correct and groups of elements were clearly explained. So basically we had to trawl through thousands of layers, checking every line was correct, it was a level of boring that no one should experience.
Which brings us to today, we currently have a big and beautiful Figma template that’s ready to sell but we can’t do that yet, we need to do something of great importance. Perhaps the most important part of any design: we need to test it on actual users.
We’ve played with the template ourselves internally but that just simply doesn’t compare to real objective and impartial testing. Based on previous experience we know 100% that issues will be discovered during user testing, and many of those issues will be extremely detrimental to users, so whatever these big issues may be, we will need to fix them but first we need to discover what they are.
So the invites have been sent out and now we need to wait for the results. Will everyone love our new Figma template, or will it be frustrating, or awful, or imperfect. We’ll keep you updated when we find out.
