From the course: Figma Essential Training: The Basics

What is Figma? - Figma Tutorial

From the course: Figma Essential Training: The Basics

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What is Figma?

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- [Instructor] I wanted to start by answering what Figma is and what it does. Figma calls itself a collaborative design tool. Now what does that mean? It just means that people are using it for website design, for app design, they're creating presentations with it, any type of design you can think of, but we can share what we design. You can create a working prototype right within the tool. Let's take a look at a generic UX design workflow and see how Figma fits in. Now UX stands for user experience design and it's something that a lot of us have heard of these days and may be actually doing. But user experience design is a little different from just straight up web or app design. It really means that we're diving into the customer, what they need, what their pain points are. We're figuring out who they are. We're doing a lot of things like different types of research to discover that. We're creating what are called personas to find out what generic customer is. We're creating user flows which basically means how they go through the app or the website to get from point A to point B. We're taking all that information and then we're starting to create our design. Now this could be a low fidelity wireframe, which means gray boxes and texts with no formatting, things like that, where you don't care about the imagery, the colors of the fonts, or we're creating full fledged designs. Then you can create a working prototype. Now we're trying to figure out, okay, before we build this thing, maybe this app or this website, how can we make it to where people can test it out on device, they can tap on a button, they can go to another screen for instance. And actually get a feel for how it's going to work. We can then share it with people, test it, gather that feedback and start to iterate and make changes based on that feedback. And finally, we'll go out and build whatever it is we're creating. Now, this is a really generic process I outlined here. And depending on your project, your company, there could be a lot of other points in here. Figma fits squarely right in here. So it's going to allow us to go in and design, to wireframe if we want, low fidelity or high fidelity, create a prototype right within Figma, share it, test feedback, gather that feedback, iterate, work with others collaboratively and keep going. So that's what Figma is in a nutshell and with an idea of what it is, next you'll take your first steps into the app by signing up if you haven't already.

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