It is incredibly rewarding to create Figma plugins. There’s a moment of magic when your plugin first runs and you see a difficult task made trivial. It highlights how automation can make life so much easier, for you and everyone else. I think everyone should experience that moment.

I’ve been developing Figma plugins for almost two years now, and here I’d like to share key learnings that helped me discover new ideas and create better Figma plugins.

Start small

Start small to prioritize essential learning while executing well.

When starting out, especially if you are new to programming, pick a small problem. Starting small allows you to prioritize learning the mechanics of plugin development - the programming language, plugin runtime, and APIs - while executing reasonably well on a problem. My first and most downloaded plugin, Desaturate, just allows users to desaturate images in bulk.

Think in workflows

Think in workflows to automate a series of actions to create more effective plugins.

Often the goal of a plugin isn’t to automate a single action. It’s to automate partially, or entirely, a workflow. Take prototyping for example. All prototypes involve creating mockups, creating interactions, and assigning inputs. If you want to create a prototyping plugin, then to an extent it must encompass the workflow as a whole, rather than an individual action.

Address unmet needs

Address unmet needs to create impactful plugins for a specific group of users. They will thank you for it!

Plugins can address needs that aren’t met by Figma. For example, take checking word counts on text layers or adding colorblind filters to Figma. It’s important to talk to users to identify their needs. While working on Fortnite, I discovered our designers did not have an easy way to create radial interfaces. I created Radial Generator to address their needs.

Learn from power users

Bring power user techniques to the masses, so everyone can be faster.

All sufficiently advanced products have power users who push the envelope of what’s possible. Figma is no different. Their techniques may be difficult or require a series of specific steps to perform. There’s opportunity to create plugins that simplify the execution of these techniques, so everyone, not just power users may benefit from them.

Have fun

Don’t be afraid to create for fun! It’s a great way to learn.

You can learn a lot from fun experiments. It doesn’t always have to be serious or useful. I built Is This A Meme? 💁🏻🦋, a meme generator to learn to download images and scrape search results from the web. I can now apply these learning to any project going forward. Better yet, Matias Fiori and Travisse Hansen created Figsplosion, a plugin that literally blows up your design. Is it useful? Maybe not. Is it fun? YES! Did they learn a thing or two about plugin development? You bet.

Move on

Move on to more exciting stuff when it feels right.

Some plugins don’t turn out to be useful or are made obsolete by new features. It’s okay to stop investing in these plugins if you believe your energy will be better spent elsewhere.

Get started

If these learnings inspired new plugins ideas you’d like to pursue, don’t wait. Start with Figma’s Plugin Development Guide and Yuan Qing Lim’s Create Figma Plugin framework. Get to it! 🤘

A friend recently asked “I start a new UX Design gig next week. Do you have any advice for how to adjust to a new team or company?” Now every company and team is different. But from our conversation, I arrived at two principles. They stand out as generally correct approaches to set yourself up for success in a new team or company.

Build connections

Capitalize on the opportunity to connect with folks on your team and across the company early. Most teams have meetings and structures in place to introduce you to relevant folks during onboarding. But after you’ve settled in, those structures stop working. You’re no longer encouraged to make connections. Instead, the focus shifts to delivering work.

Connecting with people can take any shape. Think 1 on 1s, happy hours, solving a problem together and so on. The thing to remember is you want to establish a personal connection. Get to know your colleagues beyond what they do for work. What are their hobbies? How do they unwind after work? How have current events affected them and their families? These are all avenues you can pursue to build a personal connection with them.

Strong personal connections have big advantages. They add empathy and trust to your working relationships. They make it easier to ask and receive feedback. They allow you to build a strong network of friends and colleagues that you’ll keep for years to come.

I’ve found the best time to connect with folks is when one of you is new to the team. Reach out, introduce yourself, and set up a 1 on 1. Again, make it a point to learn more about them beyond their work. Keep checking in every now and then. Call on them when it feels like they can offer insight into a problem you’re facing. They’ll appreciate the opportunity to help and feel comfortable calling on you for the same.

Be helpful

As a newcomer, you bring valuable knowledge and perspective to not just your role, but the entire team. You’re also able to more easily spot problems that the team has either accepted, or is completely unaware of. The opportunity here is to proactively identify and solve these problems for your team.

When connecting with your colleagues try to identify problems they are facing. If you have time, look for systemic solutions to their problems. Consider documenting an invisible process, automating a repetitive task, sharing knowledge to make your team better at something and so on.

Bringing an attitude of helpfulness makes you an invaluable asset. Beyond being incredibly fulfilling, you’ll find that it pushes you to learn new skills and allows you to advocate for yourself with more confidence. You also lead by example and encourage your team to be more helpful to others.

Over time everyone’s life becomes a little easier. They have more time to give to themselves, their work and others around them.

The ripple effects are huge.

Recently someone asked for Reddit "What is your preferred case study length?" I believe their intention was to understand if it's better to write a detailed case study or a short and scannable one.

I had a few thoughts on the matter.

There are many examples of great case studies both long and short. Fundamentally, I don't think the length matters, only the quality of your storytelling and how well the length accentuates it. In that sense, you may think of case study length as a personal decision rooted in two domains - the ability to maintain a portfolio and to make it usable - that work together to free up time for you to write great stories.

Maintain a portfolio

When thinking about portfolio maintenance and writing new case studies, it's helpful to think about what you enjoy and what you are strengths as a storyteller. Ask yourself the following:

1. How easy or hard is it for me to write a case study? How do I feel about the writing process itself?
2. Do I struggle more with short or long form content?
3. Do I prefer with graphics more than prose?

Make it usable

When considering usability, you want to dig a little deeper into your core audience like recruiters and hiring managers and understand how you can maximize your portfolio's impact on them.

5. How much will the average recruiter read on my portfolio?
6. How can I make sure they see the information they need to make a decision about calling me?

For me, the answers are:

1. Pretty hard. I'd rather show the work than describe it through a case study.
2. Long form content by far. I'm still getting better at long form writing, but I'm currently best at short form.
3. Graphics. It's easier to show process through graphics than it is to describe it.
4. From what data I could gather, most recruiters spend 2-3 minutes on a portfolio. About 400 - 800 words.
5. Highlight the best projects, write short punchy case studies. Maximize the % case study read / min ratio.

And based on those answers I prefer to:

1. Write case studies that are 800 words or less, no exceptions. Shorter case studies force me to choose only the most important parts of a story. It naturally makes my writing more impactful.
2. Choose graphics over prose: people grok images faster than words. And with the limited word count, I can tell more efficient stories with graphics.
3. Write small paragraphs broken up by graphics: creates great visual rhythm and keeps case studies from feeling overwhelming.

Hope this helps you find the right answer for you!

COVID changed my life in many ways, but perhaps the most unexpected was how I consume social media and news. In the before times, I'd follow everything everywhere. "Foo Fighters and The New Yorker are on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Follow, follow and follow." My feeds looked the same on all social apps. This was great before COVID because I had less time to browse social media. I could open one app and be caught up with everything.

But boy did it break fast during COVID! Working from home, I had so much more time to consume social media that my repetitive feeds were quickly exhausted. To add some variation, I played around with my feeds a bit. Unfollowed everything I didn't care about. Picked a few trusted news sources (WSJ, CNN, The Verge, etc.). Reduced duplication across feeds. After 8 months I figured out what worked for me.

Intentional curation to the rescue

The problem with following everything everywhere is the lack of control over what you consume. Social media is driven by recommendation algorithms that show you what they think you like. If you like a lot of different things, the recommendations are all over the place and it all starts to seem like noise.

To cut through irrelevant recommendations and repetitive feeds, I now intentionally curate my social feels. While doing so, I play to each platform's strengths. Facebook is great for keeping up with friends and family but terrible for news. So I follow only friends on Facebook, no news. Same for Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and others. It is the polar opposite of following everything everywhere, and that's why it works.

The biggest payoff of intentional curation is you get to leverage the strengths of each platform and make it so that each app serves a specific niche. It also gives a chance for recommendation algorithms to shine since they're only dealing with a few interests.

Putting it into practice

So how can you put it into practice? Your existing feeds are a good starting point. From there, think in buckets. Everything you want to follow goes into buckets - one for friends, one for news, one for public figures or content creators, one for personal interests like music or art genres, and so on. Then decide where you want to follow each bucket. Voila, all done.

Here's how I've set up mine. I follow friends and family on Facebook. Topics like finance, tech, and politics and magazines like WIRED and The New Yorker on Apple News. Cool people in tech and design on Twitter. Generative art and artists on Instagram. Niche interests like mechanical keyboards and video games on Reddit. Individual blogs and publications on Feedly. All my feeds show and recommend interesting content at a much higher rate. And each feed is wholly unique!

Incrementally correct

Curating my feeds is still a work in progress. I've yet to figure out what to do with YouTube. It is hard to put in a box because video is such a versatile information medium. When I figure it out, I'll update this post. But even so, it is a far cry from how repetitive my feeds used to be and a great exercise in curating what I consume.