What Sketch must do to save its business
Figma is destroying Sketch. There is plenty of evidence for this. All one has to do is search “Sketch to Figma” on YouTube/Twitter/Google and you’ll find out just how quickly Sketch is losing market share to Figma.
How quickly is Sketch losing market share?
A survey conducted by uxtools.co asked respondents what UI design tool they use. In 2017, only 11% said they used Figma, but in 2019, that figure climbed to 37%.
When asked about which tool they were most interested in learning more about, 23% said Figma while 6% responded Sketch. Sketch is the current market leader, but the writing is on the wall.
Why is Figma winning?
Figma, at first seemed like an impossibility. A web tool has never been fast enough to compete with a native app. However, the engineers at Figma went through great lengths to make that happen. And it worked!
Designers love Figma because:
- Of the generous free plan
- It’s quick (maybe even quicker than some native apps)
- Easy to collaborate (as easy as sharing a link and seeing another cursor)
- Very powerful (powerful enough to replace a stack of tools)
- Incredibly simple (many people pick it up naturally, never needing a tutorial)
With Figma’s strong adoption and interest, combined with Sketch’s negative growth and weak adoption, it won’t be long before Sketch will become irrelevant. Just like Adobe Photoshop (yes, it was once used for web design, and no, I never understood why), Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash and CorelDraw.
What can Sketch do to protect their market position as a leader?
Release an incredible free plan (short term)
Sketch needs growth and renewed interest in their product. The only lever they have right now is a generous free offering. While Sketch offers a 30 day free trial, it gets annihilated when compared to Figma’s free offering.
Their current price of $99 is a significant barrier for people who are only mildly interested in trying it out. And a 30 day trial just isn’t enough time to build proficiency in a new design tool as this is a process that takes many months of quitting and trying again.
Simplify, simplify, simplify (medium term)
When Sketch entered the market, it greatly improved on the previous Illustrator/Photoshop workflow. Or at least that’s what I hear. I’ve never been able to successfully use any of these tools without getting frustrated at how complicated they were. I used Inkscape, an open source vector design tool from when I discovered it in 2006 until late 2019, when I made the switch to Figma.
Within a few weeks/months of using Figma, I went from very slowly using only the most basic features to the same quick pace I was used to enjoying with Inkscape. This was made possible for two reasons:
- Figma was incredibly easy to pick up without a tutorial
- Even though it was a web based tool, it was fast enough for it to feel like an extension of my mind
While this is subjective, I think many will agree that Sketch is not easy to learn. It requires tutorials, lots of deliberate practice and many months of usage before you can be proficient with the tool. While this can be seen as a failure on Sketch’s part, it is also a function of how long they’ve been in business. Complexity builds over time, and Sketch is a complex tool built over a decade.
Build a browser version (long term)
The biggest advantage that Figma has over Sketch is that it works on all operating systems and browsers. This is a fundamental disadvantage that Sketch cannot overcome as it was built specifically for MacOS. Another nice side effect of being on the web is that you can share a design file with anyone in the company and they can instantly view it. This is impossible with Sketch without the help of other tools.
While Sketch was lucky enough to enjoy tremendous success as the leading design tool for many years, it now has a difficult choice to make. Should it invest tremendous resource to develop a web version or should it continue improving their Desktop software? This is a “bet the company” moment for the Sketch leadership.
The answer I think is both obvious and unsettling. If Sketch wants to be able to cover all platforms, enable quick collaboration, and solve the fundamental design decisions that make Sketch harder to use — then it must build a web based design tool that rethinks what Sketch is.
While building a design tool from scratch sounds near suicidal for a company at this stage, which it is in many ways, making this decision as early as possible will mean it has a fighting chance at holding their (soon to not be) dominant market position.
To sum up
- Sketch usage is declining and growth is minimal. Figma is moving fast to capture that market share.
- They need a free plan to grow market share
- They need to simplify their interface to kill the learning curve (if a new user needs to watch a tutorial, they’ve failed)
- They need a web based version that works cross platform and in the browser
I don’t envy the difficult decisions Bohemian Coding (Sketch’s parent company) has ahead of it. That said, I am strongly rooting for them to get back in the game because competition is good for everyone.
