UI3 in hindsight: What two years of redesigning Figma actually taught us
When Figma set out to redesign its own interface, the team had a clear north star: keep designers in flow by minimizing distractions and putting their work front and center. Two years later, as UI3 rolls out to all users on October 10, some of the boldest experiments have been walked back, some conventions were challenged and kept, and a few unexpected details — like labels and sliders — turned out to be the hardest problems to solve.
“Craft and flow don’t have easy metrics, so you have to listen to users a lot, and then process feedback carefully,” says Marcin Wichary, Design Director at Figma. That feedback loop drove the team to reverse some core decisions after launch, including floating navigation and properties panels, which had been central to the UI3 vision.
Floating panels: The ambitious idea that didn't survive beta
Redesigning a tool for designers is also a rare chance to “revisit things that feel un-revisitable,” says Wichary. The team debated what he calls “wild concepts” for the navigation and properties panels — in some explorations, panels only appeared on hover; in others, they floated above the canvas. “When you play it safe, you may not know where the ceiling is,” says KC Oh, Product Manager at Figma.
Floating panels won the initial exploration. They created a simplified, friendly interface that persisted across Figma’s product ecosystem — and they were tested in an open beta before the team made a final call. The data was clear: although some users found floating panels exciting, they hurt people who spend many hours a day in Figma. On smaller screens, the panels cramped the canvas, made designs peek out from behind them distractingly, and pushed rulers too far from the work itself.
“We want Figma to be fast. Speed is a feature,” says Oh. “The nail in the coffin was learning that they slowed people down.” For the full rollout, panels are fixed again, but they remain resizable for flexibility.
Floating UI isn’t disappearing entirely. Panels will still float in Figma Design with Minimize UI, in Figma Slides in grid view, and in FigJam by default. Toolbars float at the bottom of all Figma products.
Minimize UI and the pursuit of a singular vision
“With every creative project, you have to have a belief about the world and how it’s changing, which guides your approach,” says Ryhan Hassan, Product Designer at Figma. That belief: no matter how UI patterns evolve, the work itself should remain the center of the canvas.
That conviction led to questioning where the UI was necessary at all. The previous Hide UI feature put work front and center but was blunt and limiting. The new Minimize UI collapses side panels for distraction-free work while letting users pull tools back in without ceremony — a smoother experience on small and split-screen setups, which are increasingly common in remote and hybrid work.
The redesign also created room for future capabilities. “Before the redesign, we found ourselves playing Tetris while fitting in new features,” says Hassan. Now the navigation panel linearly lists the file name, branch name, and project name, followed by pages and layers. “As we introduce more ways to move around the file, we have a logical place for those to extend without hard tradeoffs.”
Going back to checkboxes: Clip content and blend modes
“Broadly speaking, we’ve filed away some of the training wheels of interfaces,” says Wichary, pointing to Shift-based command shortcuts that are now common despite being technically wrong, and semi-invisible scrollbars. Blend modes presented a similar negotiation — some conventions around them go back to the ’90s.
An early pass placed blend mode behind an icon button that revealed a menu, with the icon changing to reflect the selected mode. It simplified the appearance panel, but it slowed workflows because users had to wait for tooltips to confirm what blend mode was active. The final version shows an inline dropdown whenever a nonstandard blend mode is selected, making changes and removal straightforward while keeping the interface minimal.
Clip content — which hides parts of a layer extending beyond the parent frame's bounds — went through even more iterations. The team tried toggles with icons, icon buttons, and menus. In the public beta, clip content was a dropdown option, but it required an extra click that slowed workflows. The checkbox returned, visually rebalanced with the rest of the interface.
“It might have felt like a defeat, arriving in almost the same place where we started,” says Wichary. “But better to have riffed and lost, than to never have riffed at all, right?”
New collaboration rituals for an interface overhaul
UI3’s scale also changed how the design team critiqued work. Standard 30-minute design crits became 60-minute “speed rounds,” where everyone commented on each other’s work simultaneously. “This was two months of intense exploration,” says Oh. “The entire team mobilized.”
Speed rounds let designers load-balance and self-select — some focused on visual details, others on flows and the bigger picture. For Wayne Sun, Product Designer at Figma, the process revealed the full range of contexts the slider component had to adapt to: numeric values in video scrubbing, notches for variable fonts, and hue and opacity previews in color manipulation — plus the needs of a new product, Figma Slides.
Why optional labels were a self-doubt trigger
“For designers living in these tools day in and day out, even a tiny change can feel like a major upheaval,” says Joel Miller, Product Designer at Figma. “Every change needs to be grounded in a solid, sensible motivation that genuinely improves efficiency or coherence.”
UX Writer Hoi Fung Ho felt that pressure when proposing a new labeling system to help people wayfind. “I’ve never seen a system with optional labels, so this proposal made me spin with self doubt,” she says. That instinct was justified — an early minimalistic approach hurt accessibility. “This was a deal breaker,” Ho recalls. “I quickly revised the approach, which I was glad to do because being able to definitively say ‘This is what we’re doing, and here’s why’ melted the doubts away.” The final version gives all labels full context, which makes them easier to implement as a bonus.
The labeling system was one part of a broader effort that included hand-drawn icons from Tim Van Damme, a reworked properties panel, and an overall shift from cruft to craft. “We’re constantly in a balancing act, trying to push as far as we can while making sure that UI3 logically progresses for people coming from the old interface,” says Hassan.
That balancing act extends to interpreting the feedback itself. “Let’s say we get some critical feedback,” says Wichary. “Is that just a natural reaction to change, or is there something long-lasting here? Does this feed into some of the self-critique we’ve already built up on this idea? Is the negative feedback matched by positive feedback in the right ratio?” The questions, he notes, are familiar from running design crits — “but now times a thousand.”
Handing Control to the User
“Redesigns are fun for designers, but can be genuinely scary for users,” notes Marcin. “It never feels like the right time.” Keeping that in mind, the team made sure UI3 includes an opt-out during its beta period. That way, if UI3 lands in the middle of your work week, you’re not stuck. “If you get UI3 on a Wednesday, but have a work deadline for Friday, you can still go back to the old version and get things done,” says Ryhan.
That gradual rollout does double duty: it gives the Figma team room to gather real user feedback and refine the design, while also letting the community build up a library of tutorials and support resources. By the time UI3 becomes the default and the older interface is retired, the answers will already be out there.
Still, Marcin hopes users will come back to the new UI. “We think there’s a lot to love about UI3, and we’re not even finished.” Joel adds a definitive note on one long-standing ask: “Except for clip content. We’re definitely done with that.”
UI3 is available to all users starting October 10. As you explore it, the team wants your feedback—your insights are helping shape the next iteration of the design tools. For more context, see the companion piece on evolving the visual language, and the story behind Figma Sans.
