Opening Up the Design Process
Config Europe, Figma’s virtual user conference, prompted a lot of reflection on how teams can build better products by working better together. A common theme across the 22 breakout sessions was the value of opening up the product development process to a wider range of voices and disciplines.
Declan Talbert, UX Designer at the University of the Arts London, framed design systems as a key part of this shift. While often viewed as tools for designers, he argues they are a resource for everyone in product development. He asks, “How might we make a design system inclusive to allow anyone to contribute to [and] use the system?” The answer is that a design system should be more than just a pattern library; it can also encompass components like accessibility, data, and project management.
Talbert sees this as part of a larger trend: “Designers are opening up. We’re accepting more people outside our design circles.” Collaborating closely with product managers, developers, and others makes the system itself more effective. In turn, inviting a more diverse set of skills into the process leads to more “human-centered design, products, and services.” The takeaway is that it’s about “expanding the team,” not guarding it.
The Value of Failing in Public
Figma’s Kelsey Whelan and Nikolas Klein took this idea further in their session on “failing together.” For them, open collaboration was critical to the development of Variants, a feature announced at the conference.
Early testing revealed a core problem. “It was really powerful... but it wasn’t very approachable,” says Kelsey. The team wanted the feature to be usable by anyone, so they went back to work. What they thought would be a few weeks of short usability tests turned into four rounds of testing over six weeks. “We were much further off than we realized,” Kelsey admits.
The team leaned into the remote environment, inviting Figmates from across the company—not just product teams—into Zoom tests. Designer advocates, product educators, and engineering managers brought fresh perspectives, and even helped identify bugs during the sessions. Witnessing their own assumptions fail was uncomfortable. “Of course it’s hard seeing that your ideas aren’t working,” says Niko. But iterating based on feedback and seeing the feature become more intuitive created a deeper sense of reward.
The process reinforced a lesson about culture: bringing more people into the process results in a better user experience, but also a more open way of working, where failure is an opportunity to “fail forward,” together.
