Lessons from the Trenches: Building Little Big Updates
Figma's latest release cycle, Little Big Updates, ships over 30 quality-of-life improvements to the platform. While each feature is small in scope, the engineering and design stories behind them reveal the complexity that goes into polishing even the most minor interactions. Here is a look at four features and the trade-offs, edge cases, and pivots their teams faced.
Multi-Select Search: The Edge Case Rabbithole
The multi-select search feature, which lets users target specific results via Shift + Click or Cmd (Windows: Ctrl) + Click, seemed like a straightforward add-on to the recently launched find and replace. The team quickly discovered otherwise.
The core problem involved Figma's object hierarchy. In a single canvas, selecting a parent frame or group makes its children visually ambiguous. When attempting to select a second parent in a search, the feature inadvertently pulled in all descendant objects, making the selection appear buggy and confusing—especially in heavily nested files.
The breakthrough came from embracing the complexity. Design lead Jackie Chui and engineer Akshay Subramaniam introduced a visual hierarchy into the find and replace sidebar to distinguish parents from children. When using Command or Shift to hover-select, Figma now shows a preview that outlines the pending children and dims the automatically selected indirect items. "Multi select is [pretty much] defined by its edge cases," says Subramaniam, noting that the fraught user experience ultimately pushed them toward a better solution than the original find and replace required.
Blur Effects: A Newcomer's Ramp-Up
Blur effects on prototyping overlays were broken at launch: the viewer grabbed whatever was rendered directly beneath a frame, but an overlay has no "beneath" in that sense. Brand new engineer Brandon Lin took on the debugging as his onboarding project.
After initial solo exploration left him second-guessing his approach, Lin documented his reasoning and a potential solution "gotchas" list for his team. Their feedback was a critical refactor request: pass the overlay's position into the rendering code so the blur engine knows exactly where to sample for content to blur. The resulting architectural addition gave overlays their own spatial context and allowed multiple overlays to properly layer over their respective frames, maintaining correct blur rendering.
On-Canvas Previews: Ruthless Scoping
Building live hover previews for design panel options could have ballooned into a massive project quickly. Designer Hauke Gentzkow and engineer Molly Lloyd tackled it with deliberate scope discipline.
Early ideation included widespread support for boolean operations, component props, and a revamped font picker. Gentzkow admits he started in a mindset that "we had to do all these really complex things, or it wouldn't be worth doing." Lloyd pushed back in terms of time and memory usage, auditing every dropdown in the Figma editor alongside Gentzkow. By flagging which options would cause huge canvas changes or geometry burns, they prioritized a small set of features that offered maximum preview value without the heavy lifting.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the narrow scope, the internal reception was fired up. "When I shared an engineering proposal, everyone was like, 'I've wanted this for so long.' I think there's a lot of internal excitement over something small, which is very Figma," says Lloyd, summing up the team culture that values detailed design utilities.
Hanging Punctuation: A Two-Camp Debate
A design-obsessed team can still deadlock over a single stylistic point. On the text bundle, hanging punctuation sparked an ongoing philosophical argument between design lead Amanda Yeh and engineer Joanna Chen over how users would interact with it.
Chen envisioned a keyboard-only entry point, treating indentation and optical alignment as purely functional spacing. Over the original pitch as a UI toggle in the type settings panel, Chen sees the toggle as leaning more toward text aesthetics. There were almost no precedents to reference and no standard CSS implementation to copy, which prolonged final decisions.
Ultimately, the team decided on the UI toggle, taking the stance that users would treat this as a stylistic refinement rather than a typing mode. It was, true to form, a conclusion reached after intense long-form feuds and two very strong, differing points of view. "We'll let you know what we decide," said Yeh at the time—and they've followed through.
