Intro
Hello, I'm Sanghyo, a product & platform designer in Seoul. I recently went on an office tour of Figma's HQ in San Francisco, and in this article, I'm going to write about my experience there. The table of contents is as follows.
1.
What is Figma?
2.
How it happened
3.
What I’ve done at Figma office
4.
What I was impressed with (the office)
5.
What I was impressed with (Figma)
6.
Takeaways
Outro
1. What is Figma?
For those who may not know, Figma is a cloud-based, real-time collaboration tool that is widely used by IT companies in 2023. Although it is mainly used for UX design, Figma can also be used for other purposes such as presentations, brainstorming, business roadmaps, illustrations, emoji creation, and more. Adobe acquired Figma in 2022, and as a product and platform designer, I use it almost every day. To me, Figma was not only useful for design, but also for managing curriculums, running live online workshops with students in real-time, and even writing a book. In short, it is the Google Docs of the design world. There are so many contents available about Figma even with a quick googling.
While there is already a lot of content available about how to use Figma, there doesn't seem to be much information about the company itself. Recently, I had the opportunity to tour Figma's headquarters in San Francisco and thought it would be beneficial for others to learn more about the company. Therefore, I started writing about my experience on the plane back to Korea.
2. How it happened
The United States, particularly the Bay Area of California, is renowned as the center of the IT industry. As an IT designer, I had never been to the US before and decided to travel there to visit a Silicon Valley-based IT company and get a feel for the atmosphere. I made a list of IT companies I had always wanted to visit, and Figma was the first one that came to mind, as they make a tool I use almost every day. To my delight, I discovered that their office was located in San Francisco.
Further research revealed that Figma did not offer an office tour program. However, as I was determined to visit them during this trip, I did everything I could to get in touch with them, like randomly emailing and DMing people, asking for introductions, and more. With the help of some amazing people, I was finally able to schedule an office tour. I am grateful to Juhyung for introducing me to make this tour possible and to Clara for taking time out of her busy schedule to give us a tour of the Figma office!
3. What I’ve done at Figma office
Office Tour
I was able to talk to Clara, a Figma Designer Advocate, for about three hours during the office tour. I had prepared a lot of questions for the tour, but I was a little nervous when I got there and couldn't ask many of them, which was a shame. Nonetheless, it was great to be able to talk to a Figma employee directly at Figma HQ.
Personal feature suggestions for Figma
I intentionally did not address design tokens, components, or Korean-related bugs. Instead, I suggested various things that I believe are important on a global level.
a. Improving Figma design system analytics
The current state of Figma's Design System Library analytics makes it difficult to determine which components are being used and how frequently. This feature would be extremely useful for Design Ops and designers in charge of the Design System who want to make data-informed decisions about improving the system. This feature would be available to users on the Organization or Enterprise plan.
b. Enhancements to prototyping
Figma already offers powerful prototyping features, and if you use Smart Animate and Custom easing features, you can create not only prototypes but also cool motion graphics. However, I think it is currently lacking in some professional applications. If I create a design in Figma and feel that I need more complex animation features, I move it to After Effects. I think it would be great if Figma could be used as a standalone professional motion tool, or if it could provide truly realistic prototyping.
c. Increased editor capabilities
Currently, a single Figma file can be accessed by 200 editors and 500 viewers at the same time. Although Figma already supports a large number of simultaneous connections, it is difficult to organize a super large-scale Figjam workshop for more people. When we organized the Figma Korea meetup last year, I wish we could have utilized Figjam more actively, but we had a lot more people (1100+) than expected, so I was disappointed that we couldn't use Figjam for online participants. I mention this because it would be great to support more people.
If you're Korean and interested in participating, you can sign up here
SWAGs
Figma offers various goods for sale on its website. However, it can be difficult to obtain official Figma merchandise in Korea since they do not have an office or representative there. Therefore, even if you need merchandise for a community event as a community organizer, you must request it directly from the U.S. and also consider overseas shipping time and returns. I was delighted to receive a lot of Figma SWAGs when I visited this time.
If you apply for the Seoul Configs Watch Party, we will distribute official Figma SWAGs to those who are selected offline. We will be closing the application for the Watch Party soon, so please apply! (by June 11th)
Had a Figma catered lunch
During my visit, the San Francisco office provided catered meals and snacks for employees throughout the day. During lunchtime, Figma employees from various departments gathered in the dining area to eat, and I was able to join them. After the long tour, I was hungry and treated to various delicious dishes. I even saw puppies waiting for their owners to finish their meals 
. There were also fruit desserts and coffee, so I didn't have to go outside for food. Most importantly, I was glad to be able to casually chat about Figma.
. There were also fruit desserts and coffee, so I didn't have to go outside for food. Most importantly, I was glad to be able to casually chat about Figma.4. What I was impressed with (the office)
The Figma office was very Figma-like. - it occupied three floors of a big building, so the space was quite large and diverse, and I could see a lot of branding elements throughout all the office spaces, which was quite easy-catching. There was even a Scrabble on the wall that anyone could participate in, with lots of Figma terms; like components, variants, and actual member names written on it. It felt like everyone was creating the office together, which I thought went well with Figma, where 'collaboration' is an important value.
We also saw the wit in the conference room names. BOARDROOM - BIGMA, which is the name of the room we use when we need to make big decisions like investments, and the Lorem / Ipsum room, which are the beginning of the English placeholder words, were more memorable, and there were a lot of rainbow graphics to symbolize diversity. You'll also see rainbow graphics on the Figma loading bars in June, and the office fit in well with the digital product - it was cool and not tacky at all, even though despite all such strong colors.
Interestingly, Clara told me every team has a budget to create team-specific merchandise! There were tons of Figma merchandises, artworks, etc. It was inspiring to see the various goods designed by different teams around the office. As an outsider, I believe that this is a great perk for team building and external branding purposes.
I forgot to mention that Figma is a Silver YouTuber, and I saw evidence of this at the office. Figma uploads tips, guides, and conference videos on YouTube to help us use Figma well. I'm subscribed to the channel because it provides quality educational content.
Another thing that impressed me was the bookshelves in the office, where employees can donate books all the time if they want, and there were so many books in different categories.
Figma also allows pets to come to work, so it was nice to see dog owners and their dogs in the conference room together. I could see quite a few dog food bowls here and there at the office, and they were cute indeed.
5. What I was impressed with (Figma)
Facilities and People
I don't believe the daily work scene was much different from IT companies in Korea, but I do remember that almost all of the office desks were adjustable motion desks.
In addition to Clara, the employees we met along the way were very friendly. For instance, Justin, Darren, Emma said hello to us when we ran into each other unexpectedly during the tour.
At Figma, they have a mix of home and office work. At first glance, it seemed there weren’t so many people at the office when I had the tour, but I was surprised to lots of people during lunch. I thought there were about 400 people working at Figma in total, but she informed me that around 600 people are working based in SF, and globally about 1,100+ people in total (located all over Europe, Singapore, Japan, New York, etc.). This was many more people than I thought!
Various Job Titles including Designer Advocate
Clara also explained that the Designer Advocate role at Figma is to inform and suggest Figma to various customers based on their design expertise. Since many of them are former designers, I wondered if there were still opportunities to "design" at Figma now that their roles have changed. She answered that there are! I was suprised that she designed the JIRA widget that I use so well in my work.
She was curious when I told her that in Korea, it's common in the industry to have a title of 'Platform Designer', which is dedicated to designing systems (in addition to the role of Product Designer). In English-speaking countries, the same role seems to have different titles such as 'Design Ops' or 'Product Designer - Design System'.
Education & Collarboration in general
Not a surprize, Figma is not only focusing on design, but also on education in general. The driving force behind Figma is real-time collaboration, which also can be a very useful tool for teaching classes to large groups of non-designers. Since I work as a designer primarlily, I didn’t have an opportunity to hear about Figma’s view of education, with was great to learn about.
6. Takeaways
As we talked, I realized that I was the first Korean citizen to visit the Figma SF office, but apparently there were some requests for office tours from overseas already. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't the first user to visit Figma from overseas, but it was still very meaningful for me for sure.
I could also learn that Designer Advocates at Figma are the ones who host Config & Schema, which are the main design conferences at Figma. While we were takling about it, I happend to share the website of the Config watchparty in Seoul too.
She told me that there is a casual design-related podcast on Spotify too! The title of the podcast is ‘It Depends.’ If you're curious, you might want to check it out. Link
Outro
I think it's pretty difficult to keep up with Figma-related events in Korea because of the time difference with San Francisco(-16 hours) and the lack of official support from Figma. Nevertheless, this year's convention looks like it's worth checking out. It seems like there's a pretty big major updates this year too, and you can find out more about it in the Link. It's a difficult time zone for Korean, but still, why not watch it together? I'm looking forward to June 22nd and hope to see others there :)