On organizing your UX work (in Figma or elsewhere)
I’ve been following the Workspaces newsletter for a while now, and it’s pretty damn pleasing. Picture this: home office after home office setup with meticulously curated and positioned office arcana, like beautiful aluminum headphone stands, bespoke mechanical keyboards with glowing lights, gigantic curved monitors straight out of Minority Report, one-off tchotchkes and 3D printed figurines…it’s like Dribbble for the real world (and sometimes, I suspect, equally as stage-managed).
But on some level it makes a ton of sense: paying attention to /where/ you work will almost certainly affect /how/ you work. There’s a reason some people like working in coffee shops (known as “distracted focus”, while others absolutely must listen to death metal on high volume, or atonal bongs and boops. We each have our own recipe for how to get shit done, and that’s pretty cool.
I think this extends to our actual work as well, or should I say into it — and I mean literally: inside the pixels of our Figma, Sketch and XD files.
Over the years I’ve seen the working files of so many other designers, and they’ve varied incredibly in terms of organization, layout and structure. Some are what looks to me like a colossal mess, with randomly named pages, inconsistently used text styles, artboards and frames strewn about like so much detritus after a storm. Others are the polar opposite: pristine works of art in and of themselves, with a table of contents, clear headers and consistent naming conventions. It really does run the gamut.
I think everyone should be able to organize their work as much or as little as they please — whatever it takes to get the job done is fine by me. With one important reminder: getting the job done means having a file that works for both you and others.
Here’s a quick test: if a colleague like a PM or engineer, say, is dropped into your file, would they be able to find what they need? Or would they be totally lost in the madness of your creativity?
Like the front end engineer who structures code cleanly and comments meticulously (if such a unicorn exists), in order that the next developer can pick up where they left off, so too should designers think about who might eventually traipse through their Figma files without them present to hold their hand.
And everyone’s had that moment when some random executive appears in a file in edit mode and starts snooping around unsupervised, so it might be wise to at least tidy things up a bit 😱
I think the lesson is this: does how you organize your work, work for you…and your cross-functional partners?
Some food for thought.
