Figma the villain, why great products fail, decentralizing UX with GenAI

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UX Collective Editors

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3 min readSep 9, 2024

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“Globally, Figma has created a “love brand,” particularly among younger designers and those who focus primarily on UI design.

Its savvy community engagement, strong brand equity, and initially user-friendly approaches made it easy to forget that, at the end of the day, Figma is still a business.

And businesses need to grow, especially when they’ve raised a significant amount of venture capital and are operating in a post-zero interest rate era. This is where, it seems, the current friction begins.”

The story of Figma: long enough of a hero to become a villain? →
By Jan Takacs

Editor picks

Minimum Viable Softness →
Colonialism under the cloak of newness.
By Flavio Masson
Are you gathering knowledge or simply performing it? →
Creating truly user-centric products.
By Meltem (UX Career Coach)
How to brand science? →
What branding can teach us about making science captivating.
By Louis Charron
No, Elon, you can’t make a “WeChat of the West” →
Can Twitter ever become an everything app?
By Daley Wilhelm
Why great products fail without human-centered sales strategies →
Should a designer’s role be integrated into the sales process?
By Himanshu Bharadwaj

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe →

Make me think

The home as a place of production →
“We are allowing tech to colonise every single facet of our lives. This hyper-digital life takes us further away from ourselves and the embodied experience. (…) To create environments in which humans can truly thrive, we need to be guided by different principles than just comfort and ease.”
The marginalization of touch in a digital world →
“The sheer number of tools and toys that have been replaced by an app on my phone is mind blowing. Pen, paper, calculator, notebook, novel, telephone, wall clock, wallet, credit cards, photos, maps, video games. Sure, it’s convenient, cost-efficient, and space-saving, but it’s thrown me into a serious case of texture withdrawal.”
Spotify has a fake-band problem. It’s a sign of things to come. →
“Covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid.”