Remote Work Leaves a Measurable Mark on Collaboration

Figma's data science team took advantage of its own product to test what happens when remote teams get dedicated support for moving their workflows online. Growth Data Scientist Wendy Lu shared the results of that experiment and how broader usage patterns shifted over the past year.

A Template Experiment for a Remote-First World

When Figma went remote in March 2020, the growth team had a hypothesis: if they built and surfaced collaboration templates specifically designed for remote work use cases, they would see a measurable increase in collaboration, not just in design but across team functions. To test this, they built a "template picker" that let users create new files from blank presets or those remote-ready templates, and ran it for a portion of their existing user base.

Users who received the template picker showed a 5% higher rate of collaboration (measured as the percentage of users making edits or comments in a shared file). The experiment also drove feature discovery: 10% more users discovered frame presets, and 90% more users leveraged files from the Figma Community when creating new files. That usage spanned beyond just designers; the most popular templates covered both design-centric tasks like remote design sprints and broader applications such as whiteboarding and team-building.

Mapping Collaboration Across Regions and Teams

With over 80% of Figma users outside the U.S., the data science team also analyzed global collaboration patterns. Their findings paint a picture of how work has dispersed:

  • Cross-country sharing is up: Europe was the fastest growing region for cross-country collaboration in 2020, with double the file shares in February 2021 versus a year prior. Globally, collaborative files shared across different timezones grew 3.5x in February 2021 compared to the previous year, outpacing the 2.6x growth seen across all collaborative files.
  • More non-designers in design workspaces: The ratio of non-designers to designers on professional teams grew by 25% from February 2020 to February 2021. File shares between designers and their cross-functional colleagues jumped 140%, and the editor-to-viewer ratio increased by 12%, reflecting a shift towards inviting more view-only collaborators for feedback.
  • Collaboration starts earlier: The data science team measured "time to collaboration" as the days between file creation and the first time someone other than the creator opened the file, within a 90-day window. That average time dropped 11% from pre-COVID to Q2 of 2020 and held steady for the rest of the year, signaling that teams integrated collaborators into the process much sooner.

Case Studies in Shifting Workflows

Figma also connected with customers to see how these trends look inside real organizations.

Atlassian: Social Design at a Distance. When Atlassian closed its offices in March 2020, designer Jake Miller says moving to Figma files more closely mirrored being in the office. He credits real-time presence for this, noting that seeing everyone's cursors "makes it feel like you're collaborating, rather than just handing things off piece by piece." By embedding Figma files in Confluence, Atlassian has kept the entire cross-functional team involved, with Miller saying "everyone is a part of the design process" and that "it made remote work feel like team work again."

Dropbox: Defaulting to Async. In its move to a virtual-first model, Dropbox shifted a significant portion of collaboration from live meetings to file-centric work. According to VP of Design Alastair Simpson, this "async by default" approach combats Zoom fatigue and communication overload, preserving time for strategic work. Simpson notes that pauses in async communication "create space for us to elevate our work." Dropbox now records design reviews and shares them with notes so colleagues can review them on their own schedule, which Simpson describes as helping "level the playing field" and making their team "more nimble and inclusive."

The long-term changes are a mix of necessity and preference. While a return to some in-person work is likely, the data reflects a durable shift in how teams use shared files—inviting more people into the process earlier, and relying more on asynchronous tools for showing work.