Why FigJam Needed Its Own Table
Tables are one of the oldest tools for organizing information, and they haven't changed much since the days of clay tablets and ledgers. The core building blocks—columns, headers, and alignment—remain as effective as ever. The Figma product team saw internal teams frequently improvising tables in FigJam using stickies or shapes for planning, roadmapping, and meeting facilitation. Building them natively was the obvious move, but getting there posed a significant technical challenge: supporting the simple, familiar table experience within a multiplayer, real-time collaborative environment.
The team scoped the feature deliberately. FigJam is not a place for complex data manipulation; it is a space for visually presenting information in a way that is digestible and easy to update as projects evolve. The goal was a native tool that outperforms ad hoc stickie-and-shape solutions, while staying simple for both the person creating a table and the people editing it. The result had to be clear, easy to use, and editable by everyone on the board.
Two Sides, One Design
Architecturally, the team weighted two interaction modes equally: creating a table and editing an existing one. For creation, they leaned on a familiar FigJam pattern—one click in the toolbar generates a pre-styled element. This removes the burden of tweaking colors or fonts. Tables use a limited, predefined style palette, and when you change a table's color, the text inside automatically adjusts for legibility. Styling for new rows or columns is derived from the preceding ones to keep everything clean and consistent.
This constraint on native styles freed the team to refine the visual details. Designing the lines between cells and headers required a lot of iteration. The solution involves programmatically drawing strokes on selective edges, so that the lines appear uniform even where they are technically inconsistent, striking a balance between delineating space and adding visual noise.
The Multiplayer Merge Challenge
Unlike other FigJam elements, a table has potentially limitless cells, each of which can be edited by different users simultaneously at various zoom levels. For standard elements, a last-write-wins approach handles conflicts, but tables are different. Concurrent edits often need to be merged. For example, if one person types in a cell while two others make their own edits, the final text should reflect all contributions. This required merging changes rather than simply overwriting them. Multiplayer concerns consumed at least half of the engineering time on the project, with months spent chasing edge cases and bugs.
The multiplayer reality also forced the design team to reconsider FigJam's standard editing patterns. With most elements, editing UI appears on click when the element is selected—which works when only one person is editing. When multiple users select cells across multiple tables, that UI becomes overwhelming and unclear, especially at distant zoom levels. Testing with simulated players confirmed this confusion.
The team diverged from standard FigJam behavior in two key ways. First, the editing UI for tables now appears only on hover, following the user's cursor, and displays a single large button to add a new column or row. Second, interactivity scales with zoom level. When zoomed out, the table simply functions as a movable object. As the user zooms in, controls for resizing and adding rows or columns appear. This progressive disclosure keeps the interface uncluttered and meets users where they are.
Looking Forward
Future plans include expanding what can live inside a cell beyond text. The concept, referred to as "parenting," would allow other FigJam elements like stamps or stickers to be placed within a table. For now, non-text objects can still be dropped into cells, but they won't scale or move with the table itself.
The design philosophy remains grounded: tables shouldn't be a revolutionary paradigm shift. They should behave the way people expect them to, making collaborative visual organization feel just as intuitive as it did on a wall in Mesopotamia.
