dug Does living in Figma all day mean designers are giving away their influence? (hope I’m wrong but hey, can’t help wondering)
I love Figma as much as the next designer, but I’ve been comparing interaction design (UX) specs from 2016 with today’s artefacts. Those older docs showed screens, flows, and animations in a relatively clunky static format, but they also encoded decision logic, constraints and trade-offs.
They connected user needs to system behaviour and organisational capability. They were governance tools.
As designers, by creating these docs we owned (or influenced) accessibility intent, service boundaries, escalation logic and failure modes. Those things are really consequential.
Figma is brilliant at form, layout and persuasion. Where it’s less convincing, is policy, rationale, system rules and edge cases. So when everything collapses into Figma, ownership drifts: engineers own behaviour, legal owns risk, compliance owns accessibility, product owns strategy?
Designers might get left with “make it nice once decisions are made” and that really doesn’t feel like leadership or influence. While we’re busily organising design system artefacts or exploring Make, our role gradually shrinks from framing problems to decorating solutions.
When budgets tighten, or AI automation beckons, this certainly doesn’t feel like we’re a necessary expenditure:-(
We fought for a seat at the table, got it, then showed up with pixels while everyone else brought models and frameworks. It’s like as a profession we’ve forgotten what made us powerful: sense-making, decision framing, exposing human consequences. Those old interaction docs were boundary objects – tools to say “if we do it this way, here’s what breaks”. In an AI-driven, policy-heavy world, shouldn’t that kind of work matter more than ever?
Possible next steps could be to make a list of what we want designers to ‘reclaim’, like intent; rules; governance; system behaviour? This could mean getting familiar with artefacts like operating models; decision frameworks; orchestration patterns?
Maybe this is my todo list for 2026, or at least the start of it:-)
#Figma