Supporting only native styles meant that Swiadek could get really picky about the UI that separates and highlights cells and headers, too. “When you add a new row or column, we derive the styling from the previous row or column,” says Swiadek, and if you change the color of the table, the text inside automatically adjusts for maximum legibility.
They can always switch up the colors, but there’s a limited palette to choose from and the whole table gets styled together to make sure its contents are clean and legible. That way, creators don’t need to spend time worrying about tweaking colors, fonts, or spacing. For table creation, designer Jakub Swiadek leveraged a flow that already works well for other features in FigJam: One click in the toolbar creates a pre-styled new element. When it came to architecting tables, these two behaviors were given equal weight. PMs, PMMs, designers, and just about anyone else can use tables, but there are only two ways to interact with them: Create a table or edit an existing one. The table “creator” and “user” are equally important The user needs were pretty straightforward: make it clear, make it easy, make it editable by everyone. The team knew that building tables natively would be a huge improvement to the ad hoc solutions they were seeing in files-and performance would be better, too-but, with those use cases in mind, they didn’t want to over complicate FigJam’s table feature.
Visually presenting information is core to many of the cross-functional table use cases the team sees on a daily basis: PMs lay out feature requirements and their respective priority in a PRD project owners track progress on plans product marketers write up messaging hierarchies for feature launches designers collect feedback in crits brainstorm facilitators enumerate ideas and tally votes. “It's more about visually presenting information in a way that's super digestible and easy to change over time as a project evolves.” “FigJam isn't the tool that people go to for complex data manipulation,” Woods says. For PM Conor Woods, it all comes down to how people use FigJam. “Part of the joy of FigJam is that it’s fairly simple, especially compared to Figma,” says Jessie Alvarez, the lead engineer on tables. Should there be functionality to manipulate data, or should tables stay true to their simplest form? What would it mean to prioritize equally the experience for both the table “creator” (the person populating the table) and “user” (the person consuming information)? And how would support for different zoom levels factor in, along with multiplayer editing from an engineering perspective? When it came to scoping the feature, there were so many possible directions (and levels of complexity) to choose from. PM Emily Lin hacked together an exercise based off of "StrengthsFinder" by grouping shapes in FigJam. The team wanted to support the simplicity and user expectations of the humble table, understanding that many prospective table users in FigJam will not be a designer or engineer.
#Dropbox paper merge cells series#
So why did the product team seemingly… table it… for so long? It may look like a straightforward series of boxes and lines, but making a multiplayer table is actually pretty complex. The Figma product team knew the moment had come for a table feature in FigJam when they saw their own internal teams regularly hacking them together with stickies or shapes in the quest to plan, roadmap, and even run meetings more effectively. It still comes down to columns, headers, and alignment to highlight relationships between text or numbers the building blocks continue to be robust and effective for our categorization-loving human brains. From Excel’s debut in 1985, to the launch of Google Sheets in 2006, tables have proliferated in tools like Dropbox Paper, Airtable, and Notion in recent years, but haven’t changed much in all that time.
#Dropbox paper merge cells software#
Tables like these were used for purposes as complex as inventorying property, navigating across oceans, and charting celestial events for thousands of years before software was even a twinkle in Bill Gates’s eye. The first time people designed a grid to contain and understand information, they were drawing on walls and clay tablets in Mesopotamia. Here, we sit down with the Figma product team to learn how they arrived on an approach, tackled multiplayer bugs, and finessed design details to come up with a feature that feels uniquely FigJam. Today we're introducing tables in FigJam to help you roadmap, plan, and organize information more effectively.
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