Unpacking the stack, I built the plugin with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Figma techniques for better content design | by Jason Fox | Medium What Is Figma Used For: 10 Examples & Ideas | Design Shack It gives us a shared set of tools to align on goals, capture thoughts, and track progress. They need the ability to zoom out from looking at specific screens to see the broader landscape of the content. No doubt you've heard your design counterparts talking about it, and maybe you've viewed wireframes or dabbled a bit on the page yourself. You need to know what came before and what will come after to ensure youre helping guide the user and set their expectations. Workshop: Adv Figma For Content Designers - May 17, 2023 Because Figma is web-based, youre never writing in a silo. When youre using Figma, a web-based tool, you can design how the product looks and what it communicates hand-in-hand. The content in a headless CMS is always available to authors, in contrast to plugins that store content during the drafting phase but that subsequently become inaccessible to writers when strings get stored in a code responsibility such as GitHub at deployment. Designers and content practitioners explore content strategy, UX writing, and information architecture in Figma. Text shouldnt be subordinate to visual design. In this article, we are going to list more than 500+ free Figma design templates that you can utilize in your design project. But as with any design tool, theres a learning curve. If you have access to your products APIs, whether public or private, and some coding knowledge (or a friend to help ), this approach could be for you. Youll also need: If your team is fewer than 10 people, you can sign up for one of the sessions listed. Purchase to unlock the rest of the file. One of our most important tasks is making our product content useful. Access to plugin-managed text can be restricted: it may not be available to all stakeholders or accessible throughout the contents full lifecycle. So you have a record of all the back and forth your teamhavehad. Belly White Stone Outdoor Planter XXL, $599, CB2.com. How to do content design / UX writing in Figma - Medium Previously design technology @ Medium. Discover new insights from the Contentful developer community each month. Figma is a flexible design tool that has allowed the design systems team to partner more closely with teammates like content design, which ultimately means we build better products. Jules Simplicio, Design Systems, Firefox. If my Turn on Bluetooth CTA wasnt possible and someone was to revisit my work later on and question my decision, theyd have the reason right there without having to consult any other documentation. July 27, 2021 14 min read Picking the right Figma plugins to power your design workflow can be daunting. So get in there! on Sep 7, 2021 Applying for content design roles and trying to craft the perfect portfolio? The content, represented by strings of text, and the design, expressed in code, are intertwined in a common file. Jason Fox shares quick tricks and tips to make the most of the tool. Your team can click the design URL to observe you working in real-time, see the notes you leave yourself around key content decisions and adapt their work to yours (and vice versa). Designing content in non-collaborative tools is like a football team all training independently and then coming together on match day, hoping everything just slotstogether. Finally, a headless CMS allows the team to include supplemental information related to the content. To help you out, we went full-on Wirecutter mode. I cant think of any training Ive attended thats felt as natural and relaxed as this. It puts some structure and process in place for that wide open Figma space, including identifying the end-to-end steps of the design process. With this plugin, you can easily insert random data such as name, address, phone number, and avatar into your designs. I recently co-wrote an article about how much were loving Figma at Deliveroo. That's when I had an idea. is something that our content ancestors only dreamed about. This is a great way of showing contents impact throughout the entire user journey. Speaking to content designers/UX writers around the world, theyre often outnumbered by product designers within their teams. All rights reserved. Content organization is flat making it harder to organize and apply related groups of content to your design. Its the responsibility of every content designer to help their team write better content. Jason is a content designer at Chime where he uses language to help members achieve financial peace of mind. But I wanted to go a bit deeper with this post and describe how to actually do content design usingthetool. Design content-first by writing out conversations, 4. Use comments to collaborate on and document content decisions, 5. Learn more -> Developers Our API, CLI, and SDKs allow developers to fetch up-to-date product copy and integrate it into their build processes. When employed effectively you can increase the fidelity and realness of your output leading to more resilient designs and improved feedback when reviewing with teams, stakeholders, and users. That means weve been designing better content, faster. It's also a vector design tool, meaning you can create detailed illustrations without losing quality. We role-played the conversation to uncover the relevant information needed in order to do the jobs of our chosen role, in the order that seemed most natural. Figma connects everyone in the design process so teams can deliver better products, faster. This Summer's Outdoor Planter Trends, According to Design Pros Teams can apply taxonomy terms to indicate the goals the text is supporting. As a result, we now have a tool within Figma that allows us to create mocks quickly and collaboratively. These skills are essential for building a great portfolio for yourself and potentially for your own company. But sometimes content design isnt considered until late on in the process, meaning you dont always get visibility of user journeys or the bigger picture. I could ask the question without disrupting their flow and get feedback about what was and wasnt technically possible to help inform my design decisions. With the plugin, you can easily create versions of your designs in different languages to target different audiences. As a content designer, our focus is still on content: how its organized, what it includes, what it says. We recommend creating or joining a Figma Slack channel at work to share ideas and ask questions. This means close collaboration with an engineer. The global leader in UX content design training, online courses, workshops, jobs, and coaching. With many tools this is so difficult. Early adopters have told me that one of their absolute favorite things about the Contentful-to-Figma plugin is that it provides a flexible platform for designers and copywriters to bring their creative visions to life. This brings me nicely onto lesson number 2. Adding a headless CMS to your UX toolkit gives teams more versatility to explore and validate options and develop better requirements, improving the governance of content by promoting reuse and consistency. This may be both the most obvious and least obvious solution for getting dynamic content into your designs. Figma is widely known for its user interface design capabilities. Frox - Multipurpose Dashboard Figma UI Kit. But Figma becomes harder to use when dealing with a diverse range of content and design variables. In both these cases, the design needs to fit the content, making sure it adequately highlights what needs to be presented without being hard to read or notice. Like thought-provoking keynotes and interactive workshops? Focus on the usability of all the content thats presented to customers. Memorize these shortcuts and for an instant bit of momentum into your Figma explorations: Once youre zipping around Figma design files with your trusty shortcuts, you might want to broaden your skillset with techniques that will help you iterate on ideas, manage dynamic content, and share your work. May 17, Wednesday. Figma techniques for better content design Encourage your team to collaborate with Figma to map out those journeys and then map the content needs underneath so everyone can see them. The instructor will provide feedback and answer any questions you might have about anything we covered. Register now, Create with Compose, Launch, and Workflows, Apps and integrations to extend Contentful, Powering mobile experiences for global brands. Figma includes absolutely everything you need to run a productive content design workshop. A lot of us do this through periodic workshops or creating guides. Design your screens. Use your favorite tech stack, language, and framework of your choice. Our pull towards tools that focus on the words also isnt a bad or surprising thing. Do you have other tools or techniques you love using to design with dynamic content? We collaborated with design systems to build a project template file. These days, Figma is where the bulk of design work happens. This post features 5 lessons to help you make the most of this new way of designing. You dont need all the parts for every design project. T for text, then: single click and type with auto-resize textbox, drag a rectangle for fixed text box, You might stop at being an effective and efficient collaborator in Figma. Or as close to real content as you can get. Is it too late to make a change to the layout to fit our content needs?). But when we get stuck, weve saved ourselves time and frustration by asking a UX design colleague to troubleshoot. Use real content to inform UI Part of your job as a content designer is to champion the content and its purpose. This will nudge any visual exploration to start with the content. Build more empathy for users of your product by seeing how realistic content in your product actually looks and feelsthe good. Connecting data from the actual world with the layout of a webpage. Figma pages dont represent the structure of the content. You can iterate later This is especially important if you werent involved from the outset because it will help you spot ineffective UI as early as possible. This helped us do a number of additional things, all before anything was done visually: 3. Get 15% off when you buy 2 courses, 20% off with 3, and 25% off with 4 or more. The workshop includes 3 hours of instruction and exercises. Source content never goes stale and can evolve with the product. Dynamic elements like this saves you time when designing content that will be viewed on different device types or translated to different languages. Content and design decisions involve two levels of issues: Consider a simple case of a component that presents a primary and secondary action to support a sign-up process. Its a thing of beauty, really. This makes sure that when your content is shared on social media, it looks great. By Catherine Romano. Use our Figma plugin to quickly edit text in designs and track progress. Teams will need to decide when presenting the content if variations of the base UI component are required or if an alternative UI component would be better. When employed effectively you can increase the fidelity and realness of your output leading to more resilient designs and . So take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics of hosting a content design workshop in Figma, and then try running one for yourself! And if that one UI element isnt working, it could have huge knock-on effects for the entire flow. design and collaboration platform for user interfaces. You can populate your spreadsheet manually, or set up a system to populate it for using SQL or a Google form . 2018-2023 UX Content Collective. Like Viba Mohan pointed out, however, it's often the 'neglected middle child' of design, because lousy copy is able to ruin the entire experience of your design for a customer.. Role play user conversations in Figma frames to keep content and design aligned. If theres anything urgent or requires you specifically, you can be contacted via the comments. Its a straightforward matter. Are you getting the idea? Well also dissect the trade-offs of each approach and think through what to consider when using these techniques. This can boost the maturity of your content design operations. Easy to cycle through content allowing for easy stress testing of your design. Skill up and save. Use human language, not system language. In Figma, they may also be inclined to comment about things other than the content, such as button colorstopics that may not even be open to discussion if determined by the existing design system. They can try out how the content appears in different variations of a specific UI component, or they can see how the content might appear in different UI componentswhich is an especially useful benefit when planning content that needs to be presented in different channels or on different platforms. This change may not look super impressive now but let's add some styling to see the power of auto layout. You have access to the project so you can swoop in and finesse it later if you have the time. In the example below you can see how each component has different variants for different content states. Click to add a new style. Its hard to know what content is available, what that content is related to, and if it is consistent. But as with any design tool, theres a learning curve. 2. And of course, it was a natural choice for me to use the Contentful JavaScript Client Libraries for the plugin because, as a former Contentful employee, I was already familiar with it. One way to design content-first is to start everything with a conversation. The global leader in UX content design training, online courses, workshops, jobs, and coaching. Are variations of the base component needed? Sometimes the design can reduce the need for text. To solve for this, we partnered with the design systems team to create a low-fidelity wireframing library. Fortunately, a headless CMS can provide that missing capability. The fragmentation of content across different pages and frames makes it challenging to maintain and revise content as well. Heres an example of how we could set up a sheet for our designs: This plugin works by mapping the column names from the Google sheet to layer names in your design. Structure lets teams prototype more scenarios: Because the content is stored in the CMS, and not embedded in layers of UI components, teams can show the same content in different ways. The shape can change. This brings me nicely onto lesson number 2. When everyone (engineers, product owners, product designers) can see you working in real time in the shared Figma file youre showing just how much thought goes into putting the right content in the right place at the right time. Figma is a critical tool for design collaboration. And they want to check that the library of image assets will display clearly in the design. One particularly handy knock-on effect of this is the increase in exposure of your work as a content designer. Even after writers learn the basics of Figma, they can be at a disadvantage when it comes to driving the content requirements. The content is organized in the CMSs content model, showing the relationships of all content used in the enterprise. You can iterate laterThis is especially important if you werent involved from the outset because it will help you spot ineffective UI as early as possible. Loop in the engineer immediately just by tagging them in a comment in the design file. This will nudge any visual exploration to start with thecontent. This means that we cant always be around to work on everything and prioritisation is a must-have skill. Teams need a consolidated view of their content. Cross-functional teams get together in Figma at early design phases to brainstorm and workshop. It structures content into descriptive fields, not generic rectangles on a page. Encourage your team to collaborate with Figma to map out those journeys and then map the content needs underneath so everyone can see them. Realistic variety of content and use-cases sourced from the community. Before Figma, the Firefox content design team worked in a separate space from visual and interaction designers. . By contrast, when reviewing content in Figma, business stakeholders need to adapt to an unfamiliar application they rarely use. Explore the different types of content and caveats you'll . Give it a name "Body". Some examples of how using dynamic content can help: In this post, well take a look at some useful techniques for getting dynamic content into your designscovering variants, community plugins, and custom plugins. Also, you can automatically make multiple designs with the same structure like marketing banners which saves time during the design process. Jason is a content designer at Chime where he uses language to help members achieve financial peace of mind. If it's a draft copy, it doesn't need to be the final copy; it's just the gist of what will likely go in certain places. Or as close to real content as you can get. Bringing dynamic content into Figma means bringing in content that can easily adapt to the context and audience you are designing for and in many cases allow your designs to appear indistinguishable from your live product. Writers can focus on what needs to be said as they develop content. Cross-functional teams get together in Figma at early design phases to brainstorm and workshop. That was a broad overview of how it improved our collaboration and gave content design a better seat at the table. Figma Community copyright and licensing - Figma Help Center "Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if I could import some of the content I already have on Contentful to use in this social media banner, open graph image, or product ad banner?" In the second scenario, the content that will be presented is still yet to be determined. Put more realistic designs in front of users or stakeholders leading to more accurate and actionable feedback. So you have a record of all the back and forth your team have had. It can be used to iterate both the content and design, or just the design, in cases where the content already exists. Plugins handle strings of UI copy, which are just one subset of the enterprises content. Figma is a web-based graphics editing and user interface design app. Teams need the ability to precisely describe the content directly, instead of trying to infer the content characteristics according to tags that describe the UI components. The wording choices and amount of detail can influence the design. So when designing content use the comments to loop in those responsible for how the thing actually works and keep a track of your decision making. The Contentful-to-Figma plugin also enables you to add real data to your prototypes and lets you load assets like images directly into your designs in Figma. Designers and content practitioners explore content strategy, UX writing, and information architecture in Figma. His Figma tips and tricks appear in well-known and much-appreciated videos on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and his tool for measuring content volume on screens is an excellent tool for content designers. Figma associates text strings in relation to components; a text management plugin can at best retrospectively manage the content appearing in UI components with tags. Its a pretty typical format, with follow-along lectures and breakout practice sessions. The goal should be to extend your practices and try out new approaches. You dont need to drop your current practices if they meet your needs. Content designers need to know the context in which words, phrases, and other content are used. What is Figma? (And How to Use Figma for Beginners) Low effort for managing and maintaining a large amount of content. And it so happened that I had the skills to write the code to automate this process. This can create problems when a change on one screen forces changes on other screens. Figma is one of the most popular design tools aimed at teams. Then click the . You can do this directly in Figma by dedicating a frame to the conversation or using comments to script out the interaction with your team. As an example, earlier this year I wrote an error message that explained to the user that their printer wasnt working because their Bluetooth wasnt turned on. This means that we cant always be around to work on everything and prioritisation is a must-have skill. This gives you a better idea of how your final product will look. While UX teams increasingly recognize that writing is part of the design, dedicated design tools like Figma were not developed with the needs of content designers in mind. Skill up and save. A content model delineates the structure of content by topic or task across screens. Stay up to date on discounts, new courses, upcoming workshops, blog posts, and job postings with our newsletters. You need to know what came before and what will come after to ensure youre helping guide the user and set their expectations. The team must decide the text for the two actions and the button or link designs to present the text. Get started today and experience the power of . Stay up to date on discounts, new courses, upcoming workshops, blog posts, and job postings with our newsletters. Its a thing of beauty, really. One way to design content-first is to start everything with a conversation. Realistic content can be placed in a UI design to see how it would appear. Content cant be populated on layer groups which requires you to individually select each text field or shape you want to update. Are you getting the idea? Many UX teams are not aware that they can connect their Figma projects directly to a headless CMS such as Kontent.ai. In contrast to well-established best practices that advocate separating the content from the design so that each can be revised independently, in Figma, the content and design are tightly coupled. It offers four main benefits: A headless CMS provides teams with an organized inventory of their actual content. As an often misunderstood role, this is a great way of showing off how much you make an impact throughout the entire journey. But tagging the content shown within UI components isnt a scalable approach. Figma allows you to quickly create mockups of web and mobile apps using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Just by hitting C on your keyboard you can see all the comments in the file. 2023 Content Design Salary & Industry Survey, A computer with the latest versions of Chrome and Figma, A second monitor is useful (but not required) so you can watch and practice at the same time, Fluent English reading and writing proficiency, Some familiarity with UX writing and methods. In my experience, youll learn more from putting real content on a design than you would from a block of random text. This opportunity to step into the design source of truth at every stage of the design process is something that our content ancestors only dreamed about. Designing with real content can be messier than when using placeholder content. When I had to redesign the order tickets used by kitchen staff and delivery drivers, my product designer colleague and I scripted out several conversations straight into our Figma file before co-designing. How to Prototype in Figma | Design Shack A headless CMS that is connected to Figma can support a range of design scenarios. 2018-2023 UX Content Collective. If you have more questions about workshops from UX Content Collective, please reach out to info@uxcontent.com. Layers can be updated with content no matter how nested they are. If theres anything urgent or requires you specifically, you can be contacted via thecomments. Using this integration, incorporating real-world data into prototypes has never been easier. You select your content type after you've created a template component. Figma is a free web-based design tool that allows you to create and collaborate on high-fidelity, interactive prototypes. The Contentful blog helps builders and digital leaders create better digital experiences. truncation, injecting components based on data, etc. Workshop: Adv Figma For Content Designers - May 17, 2023. Figma allows external tools to connect to it. One of the key differences between writers and content designers is that writing is possible solo, whereas designing content is a team sport. Do any components need to adapt to display diverse content? Role play user conversations in Figma frames to keep content and design aligned. Designing content in non-collaborative tools is like a football team training independently, then coming together on match day & hoping everything slots together. Designers Our two-way Figma sync makes sure that the right copy is always in your mockups. Its already helped me work faster and smarter, and be a better collaborator with my product design counterparts. Mistakes and the need for frequent check-ins and reviews between design and copywriting arise when copy and design are not in sync, which is especially important now that many teams are working remotely. The table below reveals some of the questions that teams might explore under various scenarios. The next step is to assign a field in Contentful to each layer in Figma. The future of content and capturing customers' imagination. Figma Community plugin - Select a FRAME from your design to easily make a "Cover" page for your design files. Cross-functional teams get together in Figma at early design phases to brainstorm and workshop. But often being useful requires us changing how something works or even inventing a new way for something to work. Its a far more iterative process because youre not restricted geographically like you are with a whiteboard or technically by non-collaborative tools. You dont even have to use Zoom you can chat directly inside your Figma file. You can use it to do all kinds of graphic design work from wireframing websites, designing mobile app interfaces, prototyping designs, crafting social media posts, and everything in between. But theres one area where the platform isnt quite so versatile: it doesn't let you use real content in your designs, which makes it hard to see what the final product will look like. Its risky to assume anything and I didnt want to go any further without the answer to the question above. UX teams can pair a headless CMS with Figma to support two kinds of decisions: In the first scenario, the content has already been decided before teams start working in Figma. i.e. And if that one UI element isnt working, it could have huge knock-on effects for the entire flow. The second benefit is that using a headless CMS can make prototyping with content more efficient. Google Sheets Sync improves upon Content Reels shortcomings by enabling more robust content storage and the ability to populate your designs from grouped content thats stored in Google Sheets. What is Content Design & Why Does it Matter? If you do, then you have come to the right place. Create an illustration in Figma design - Figma Help Center While Figma may act as a source of truth for a visual design, it cant do the same for the content that will be presented in that design. It all comes together in Figma. With the Contentful-to-Figma plugin, it's easy to make Open Graph images for your website. Part of your job as a content designer is to champion the content and its purpose. This feature saves time and makes sure that all of your promotional materials, no matter what language they are written in, look the same. A good one will provide numerous features to access and manage content such as: Structured content management allows teams to zoom out and compare details that are hard to notice when embedded in many different screens. One of us played the role of Deliveroo (the system) and the other, the user. This becomes an especially important issue when the design must present existing content or data instead of copy thats custom-written for a specific component. Sammie Spector Figma has taken the UX design community by storm over the past couple of years. Before the session, participants should download Figma and create a free account. As an example, you may want copy within a field placeholder component that says Use this space to give an example value, not a usability instruction. This helped us do a number of additional things, all before anything was donevisually: When you do this, it might not become a perfect blueprint for what youre about to design, but its an incredibly useful point of reference throughout the iteration process. One way to design content-first is to start everything with a conversation. It greatly simplified retrieving and displaying the data required by the plugin. What is Figma? A Design Crash Course [2021 Tutorial]
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