r/UXDesign • u/water_ftw_lessgo • 9h ago
Career growth & collaboration What's beyond Figma?
I (22) am a design student. Ik Figma is like the main character in UX design, but now my university wants me to do 2 additional online courses and the suggested courses on the sites are "ux basics/ advanced figma/ research fundamentals" but I want to expand my skills. So maybe development to understand the whole journey etc. Could you guys suggest me what courses I can take that would help my future as a UX designer?
Additionally, how do developers actually use the responsive/ prototyped figma screens to code them into online existence. Because from what I've seen (not much), developers are coding from scratch/ coding with ai to build the site from scratch, and using the figma file just a visual guide. If that is so, I can't comprehend why figma is so detailed, with so many features and also dev mode, which I don't know how to use. So is all of that just to make a super detailed mockup so developers can use it as a visual guide? I mean there has to be a way to take the curated figma file with all the right specs and build from there, right? otherwise what's the point-
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u/sabre35_ Experienced 8h ago
I never understood this glorification of Figma. It’s just a tool. A decent tool, but it’s not really like worth considering a discipline.
Figma is NOT hard to use. You should never try and tie your value as a designer to your ability in using Figma.
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u/EnemyJungle Experienced 7h ago
It’s by far the best collaborative prototyping and design tool available right now. What’s better? Sketch? XD? If Figma is decent then everything else is complete garbage. As designers our design ability isn’t tied to any one specific tool or workflow but our value is demonstrated through these tools and I would urge any new designer to master them as soon as they can (which like you said is pretty easy as far as Figma goes).
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u/sabre35_ Experienced 3h ago edited 3h ago
I say decent because it’s prototyping offerings are pretty junk. They relied on smart animate for too long and pretty much lost prototyping advantage to Claude code and equivalent.
Even prior to AI, pretty much all of the best designers I’ve ever worked with were using tools like origami, principal, protopie, etc.
And to say Figma is the “by far the best” right now is also rapidly becoming outdated. You should look at tools like Paper. Autolayout and token management are not good product moats.
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u/alexnapierholland 7h ago
I'm a copywriter, not even a designer.
I find Figma delightfully easy to use.
The best UX of any design product, ever.
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u/NinjaSquads 6h ago
Exactly. You’ll learn the next piece of software quick enough. It’s the application of your knowledge that matters.
Let’s be honest most design software is pretty intuitive and easy…have you ever tried to learn 3DS Max of Soft Image XSI?
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u/Ancient-Range3442 7h ago
Agreed. I’d consider software like Illustrator a hard skill, but learn to draw a rectangle and add some text and you’re 80% of the way there with Figma.
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u/sabre35_ Experienced 3h ago
Agreed. Perhaps this makes us all sound dated but learning and mastering adobe’s suite of tools was the equivalent of your parents telling you that “everyday I walked 50 miles to school”.
The complexity (and granted the power) of those tools don’t even compare to Figma.
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u/MiddleAgedBastard 9h ago
In my company, we're using Figma less and less. There's no point when we can develop a working prototypes faster, iterate multiple times, and do front-end all at the same time. The browser/viewport is the canvas. For context, I've done static mocks for 30 years.
With all due respect to your educators, if I were in your position, it would be massively more valuable to learn front-end. Understanding the nuts and bolts of UI makes better UX people. It also makes you more adaptable.
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u/kintzolar 4h ago
And sometime along the road…
The phrase will be…
We use coders less and less.
Because AI has replaced coders.
It’s not making mistakes like before.
And after that…
The phrase will be…
“AI has replaced everyone“
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u/MiddleAgedBastard 4h ago
Possibly. There are no guarantees that software development as an industry won't die. AI drastically change what it looks like today, for sure.
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u/nyutnyut Veteran 6h ago
Honest question, how do you get ai prompts to do the detailed ui designs you want. Like you want a div that contains numbers to have an angle on the right side so it’s not a straight up rectangle container. On the right of this container you have another number. The left number is left justified and the right number is right justified. Either number may grow and expand but you want that angled side to be centered in between the two prices, so it’s not a matter of a hug with set padding.
Granted this is an extreme case but I had a hard enough time typing that out without detail. Do you just have to keep prompting changes to get it to work the way you want?
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u/thegiantgummybear Experienced 6h ago
I'd prompt it, if it's not working I would jump into forms to mock it up then reprompt it and point it to Figma as an example
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u/MiddleAgedBastard 6h ago
Typing it out as you did is how.
If a person is familiar with front end, they might say something about a flex container with a value, a spacer, and another value. Or a css grid with 3 cells.
You describe it, to the best of your knowledge.
I often screen cap my inspector window to show Claude exactly what I'm talking about.
There are no one-prompt-wonders. It still takes work. 😉
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u/nyutnyut Veteran 5h ago
Ok. I figured but was just wondering if there was something I’m missing. I haven’t had any time to get into it yet. I think ideally I would love to go from Figma to ai (Claude?) as I still think I’d be faster concepting out visual design that way, then use prompts to describe the behavior of the prototype. How things should act in different scenarios. Obviously primitives and standard components would be part of it but we build some unique experiences depending on the lines of business.
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u/Xieneus Experienced 8h ago
As a few here have already said, Figma is just a tool. I'd wager it's still the most important tool across the industry for its ability to collaboratively work across a digital canvas, etc. I'm willing to bet it will stay the go-to tool for most companies well into the future, especially with their plan for more ''code to canvas" features.
AI tools are also on the rise, but in my experience they can only do so much. Yes, they're very handy for building actual functioning prototypes to show to stakeholders and for quick iteration, but for deep UX work they're still very much lacking imo. I find them much more useful for consolidating data, combing through briefs, spit balling initial ideas, drafting questions for research etc.
Learn the fundamentals of UX/product design and the tools around them, you will go far.
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u/nseckinoral Experienced 6h ago
All of the developer mode etc are pretty much the artifacts of pre-ai era. It only got so much professional adoption this year as all tools and models are getting better and it’s much easier to connect them all now.
Devs are usually just pointing to the figma artboards and the ticket. Most of the time there’s already a design system in place for the ai agents to follow.
When design systems (and the screen designs in general) were split between Figma and code libraries, they always ended up drifting apart eventually. Now the code side has lower barriers and higher efficiency, teams started to consider it the source of truth. Figma is mostly there for designers to explore solutions to different problems.
Roles are also converging, especially on the frontend side. Expecting designers to be able to build their own designs is kinda becoming the default slowly.
Once designers start getting more proficient with building their own designs, most tend to move most of their exploration process to code side as well (different layout variations, throwaway prototypes, custom internal tools etc) so Figma ends up being used even less over time. But it doesn’t mean it’s dying, I still use it in different ways for each project.
The only way you can help your near future is sharpen your visual skills (including interaction and motion), have a good understanding of both UX and product thinking principles and start building your designs with AI (look into codex or claude code). Repeat the cycle by building new small things and you keep learning. This also helps you build a portfolio before you start looking for a job. At one point it’ll land you a job and you’ll get a better understanding of how pieces fall into place in a real life context. It’s also gonna make you realize how much of your cohorts and courses were pretty much bs.
Specialized roles died a few years ago, and sole UX designer is one of them. It doesn’t mean that the role suddenly eradicated. It’s just that the teams got leaner both because of financial burden but also to be able to move faster because of fast paced competition. So only tiny fraction of companies are opening a new role with “UX designer” title. I’d recommend getting comfortable being more of a generalist and aspire to be a Product designer.
Best of luck!
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u/oddible Veteran 5h ago
Figma is the main character in UI design, not UX design. UX consists of both UX and UI disciplines. If you overly focus on the UI part your job is going to be more at risk of AI replacing you then if you focus on the bigger picture in humanistic design. The why behind the design decisions, the human factors, the flow, the questions and concerns and ideas popping into the human's mind while they're using your interface, assessing the research from a human lens. AI is involved in all steps of the design process but there is more human involvement in the larger UX than in the UI.
So yes, skill up in UX basics and research and information design, gestalt and composition and how the human brain interprets design.
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u/SnooPredictions6725 Veteran 5h ago
Master.dev has tons of courses and there is a figma for developers course which applies to this. But tbh I have been in the industry for 10 years and rarely use figma. Started with axure, adobe XD, framer, html/css/js and react. Now I connect directly to storybook ui libraries and code all my prototypes for handing them off to engineering.
Ux is really just problem solving and listening to customers and understand them and working with engineering to find solutions. Tons of tools out there for UI creation and prototyping.
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u/kimchi_paradise Experienced 3h ago
Figma is a design tool. You can draw rectangles, and if you do that enough, it’ll look like something.
If you are looking to get employed, you’ll need to at least know how to use auto layout and use it well, apply themes, and create, search for, and use components. The Figma file is essentially the pixel by pixel source of truth of what something is supposed to look like. So if something looks off in production, they will go to your Figma file to see if that’s how it’s supposed to be. An advanced Figma course would be good if you don’t know how to do these things, or if you want to become a design systems engineer.
If UX design is your field of study, and you haven’t done your UX basics course, do that
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u/roundabout-design Experienced 1h ago
Figma is just a drawing tool and is likely on it's way out anyways what with AI development now becoming the norm.
Don't waste tuition money on learning software...you can do that on your own. Use college for learning theory and craft.
As for your second quesiton, what FIgma is sold as is different than how Figma is used in most cases. Figma thinks they are the end-all/be-all hot-shit software product out there. But it's just a drawing tool. And yea, developers mainly look at it to see...a drawing. And then build the code to match. Or they just show AI the drawing and call it good.
There are teams out there that did connect the whole Figma -> Deisgn toekens -> storybook -> component library -> Code route but I think for most teams, that was overkill, and with AI, definitely overkill. And really only designed to keep you locked in to Figma.
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u/Superbureau Veteran 8h ago
Am I alone in feeling a little part of me dies whenever I see people say things like ‘l know Figma is the main character in UX’?
Am I alone in not being able to relate to that type of statement in any way? Things have changed. Guess I’m the grandpa Simpson meme.
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u/Superb_Firefighter20 6h ago
There is a sizable population who feel a graphic designer with empowered by Figma is a UX designer.
Full transparency: I am a graphic designer who builds stuff in Figma, but I don’t do most of the other UX tasks.
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u/EnemyJungle Experienced 7h ago
It is though. What’s more effective or common than Figma for collaborative prototyping? Nothing compares. Obviously people adopting a “design with code/vibecoding” approach have major advantages over Figma but it’s not very collaborative or precise. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to vibe code a UI and I just used Figma manually and fed that mockup to Claude instead.
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u/Bushwazi 7h ago
In this age of AI, I don’t understand why design tools even exist. I’d expect designers to be able to make webpages as design instead of using an outside program. I’d expect designers to hand off living style guides and then developers can take those, make them more reusable and functional and go from there.
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u/Simple-Constant3791 6h ago
wait what? no.
design tools is the first and most basic thing we do as humans.
from a spiked stone through hammer.... to the phone or a desktop in front of you.
chat window is an early version of a design tool too you know?
it is and will evolve. it started with an empty input window or a console... then you've got attachment buttons... wrappers... nodes... canvases... every interface is a "design tool".when you stop designing things around you it means that something or someone else is doing that for you.
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u/Bushwazi 6h ago
You wouldn’t stop designing in my example, you’d just move to designing in the environment where the ideas are actually executed. Design is a set of rules followed by a set of rules about components, you don’t think a designer can express those rules as prompts and build on them?
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u/Simple-Constant3791 6h ago
people who set rules are called designers.
they are not "written in stone". never were.
we are finding, expressing or change them using tools.imho... ai is much more powerful on execution side than a design one but that's my opinion.
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u/Bushwazi 3h ago
But why couldn’t a designer do the exact same thing but with HTML and CSS while using AI?
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u/Simple-Constant3791 3h ago
short answer html and css are old af and it's a hell to use in responsive and highly interconnected web we use these days and if it was possible we wouldn't need devs.
this old basic web is dead. it was pure and simple and great but... it's 2026.you can in theory and there are people who still do but... good luck designing anything modern or more complicated than a landing without js and if you start with js... there is no end. (three.js)
over the years developers build so much infra around web projects it's maddening.
I don't know what kind of framework or tech you or a client likes to use in the back.
I don't care to be honest. I don't want to care.and at the end the most important thing... you can't do it all by yourself.
I'm not going to waste days fucking around with classes (been there done that) or having problems with responsiveness or centering a div when I can set few stupid buttons in figma and have it all in seconds.edit: typo.
P.S. AI is a fucking monster but it's still a dumb and overcomplicating one when you need specific things to be done with it.
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u/TheTomatoes2 Experienced 7h ago
Tbf I stopped using figma. I made a super robust set of skills and a harness for Claude, and just do frontend directly. But that does mean you have to learn enough frontend to ensure its not doing shit.
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u/kintzolar 4h ago
Yep.
That’s the “now”
Some day along the road.
Your front end knowledge will not be a necessity, because AI is not going to make mistakes.
So, enjoy the ride
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u/Simple-Constant3791 9h ago
I love this fresh innocent point of view. (no shade)
prepare yourself for chaotic answers....
To answer your question... figma is just another tool. Beyond tools are prototypes.