UI3: A Closer Look at Figma's First Major Redesign in a Decade
Figma is rolling out UI3, its third significant interface redesign since the platform's early days. The update is a response to a decade of accumulated features that, while expanding the tool's power, also added complexity. The goal is to simplify the interface without stripping away the deep functionality that professional designers rely on. The company frames the redesign as a foundational shift meant to carry Figma through its next phase of growth, which includes AI-assisted workflows and new products like Figma Slides.
UI3 is driven by four core problems the team wanted to solve: centering the user's work rather than Figma's own controls, balancing the needs of newcomers with those of power users, adapting to the changing nature of design (which now leans heavily on reusable components and generative AI), and laying a foundation for a more cohesive family of Figma tools spanning design, whiteboarding, and presentation.
Maximizing Canvas Real Estate
The redesign began with an aggressive rethinking of the canvas. Early explorations stripped the interface down to a super-minimal UI that only appeared on hover—no panels, no properties, just the work. Another iteration had sidebars that would appear and disappear on demand. These extremes proved too unstable for a work environment, but they pushed the team toward a final solution: resizable panels paired with a slim, new toolbar anchored to the bottom of the canvas. This frees up the top of the screen, creating a roomier feel and establishing a consistent structure across Figma's various products. Users can also hide the UI entirely, with panels surfacing only when summoned.
“We started with extreme changes, stripping away features until they were missed,” the team notes. “Our goal was to get as much signal as possible, then dial back as needed.”
Reprioritizing the Properties Panel
Significant changes were made to the properties panel, where the team reorganized controls based on how designers actually work today. Component-level options—like variants and instances—now take precedence over basic attributes such as fill color and size, acknowledging that design systems have made component control a daily, high-frequency task.
In another structural shift, all layout-related options are now merged into a single panel. Width, height, and Auto Layout controls live together, a departure from the traditional x, y, w, h layout seen in most design tools but one that more closely mirrors how products are structured in code. Early testing of this new panel placed width and height above the x and y position fields, but that inversion disrupted the muscle memory of long-time users, so the team adapted, keeping position fields at the top while unifying the layout tools beneath them.
Figma AI features have been integrated into a new Actions menu, which the team expects will quickly become a daily-workflow hub for tasks such as searching for components or generating text and images on the fly.
Readability Over Minimalism
Figma's historically minimalist UI—sharp edges, abstract icons, and subtle affordances—became harder to parse as more complex controls were added. UI3 introduces a more expressive visual language: backgrounds on inputs, borders around dropdowns, rounded corners, and a new set of 200 hand-drawn icons from Figma Designer Tim Van Damme. These icons are designed to be visually explanatory about how to interact with the platform. Users can toggle labels on for clarity or off for a cleaner workspace.
Even within the design team, finding the right balance proved difficult. In one iteration, team members condensed the alignment grid in the Auto Layout panel to simplify its appearance. The change made the grid move around too much in testing, so the team reverted to the original layout to preserve the muscle memory of experienced users, though the visual styling was updated to feel more approachable.
“Maintaining the vast icon system is a balancing act between ensuring visual consistency and conveying extremely complex ideas in an often abstract manner,” says Van Damme.
This friction between friendliness and power shaped much of the redesign. The team introduced optional labels to guide new users and support discoverability while preserving the speed that experts expect from keyboard-driven workflows.
A More Cohesive Figma Ecosystem
The redesign also aims to unify the look and feel of the broader Figma product family. The slim toolbar and floating collapsible panels are intended to create a recognizable, consistent pattern whether a team is brainstorming in FigJam, refining screens in Figma Design, or building a presentation in Figma Slides. Each tool keeps its own personality, but the shared interface conventions should make moving between them feel more fluid.
UI3 is the culmination of a major design push, but the team views it as a blueprint for the future rather than a destination. “We’ve laid a new foundation, and the real magic will happen as you put it to work in your creative process,” the designers write. As design workflows move from pixel-level manipulation to higher-level abstraction—from components to AI-generated assets—the interface will need to offer blocks that can be assembled rather than just individual pixels. “This redesign is a promise: to stay true to our roots, while embracing the future.”
