Modernizing Our Design Workflow: Moving from Sketch, InVision, and Abstract to Figma
By: Guilherme Schmitt
Tags: Design Systems, Product Design, Figma, Workflow, Design Process

A matter of scale

When a company is small enough, certain aspects of your workflow are easy to get by without much thought — need a file? Just ask the other designer on the team that has been here since the beginning. Going to create a new project? Cool — just take a stab at it on a file in your computer and make sure you save it to the shared drive afterward.

But as you grow, processes need to be scale too — that original designer just can't be answering the same questions every single time. Introducing — documentation and workflows!

Two years ago, Klaviyo’s design team went through its first considerable workflow shift by incorporating Abstract into our process. Abstract allowed us to guarantee that designs were not only easy to find but also easy to manage versions —no longer did people have to ask "Is this the latest one?” for every file in the drive.

However, version control only goes so far in helping designers work with each other. For Sketch, other third-party tools like InVision helped bridge that gap. Want to get some feedback? Put together a quick InVision prototype or just upload some screens so people can take a look. It was a little bit of extra effort but worked fine for a while.

As the team grew, these little inefficiencies in communicating your ideas multiplied with each new member of the team. We needed to revisit our workflow once again.

There’s no decision more disruptive to your productivity than changing the tools you use to get things done. Figma was worth all the disruption.

Tool unification and the future of work

Moving to a web-based platform like Figma meant we could more easily integrate our designs with other web-based platforms. Documentation in places like Confluence and Notion could always have up-to-date designs embedded right on the page.

Doing so would unlock two key benefits: increased efficiency (no more updating things manually) and better clarity of communication (one click away from opening the full, editable file).

At the end of the day, designs represent ideas, not the real product. To have that representation be as flexible and devoid of maintenance is the best way to ensure we can be on the same page and make decisions faster.’’

See the workflow contrast of getting a prototype available for a quick feedback session and handing off files to engineers:

In Figma:

Build a prototype directly in Figma.

Embed a link to a prototype or Frame to a Confluence/Notion document.

Organize your Figma file to guide developers during handoff.

Receive comments in the context of the design itself.

Address comments and resolve them directly on the design. Everything is up to date!

Compare it to InVision’s workflow:

Make sure your artboard names have not changed when you iterated new ideas. (new artboard name = new content sent to the InVision)

Select the artboards you’d like to update. (can only do the ones on your current page)

After sync, check if InVision updated existing artboards or, for whatever reason, created brand new versions on the site.

Build your prototypes using InVision’s prototyping tools.

Create sections in InVision to help with developer handoff.

Receive comments on InVision’s site, check what frames it relates to in Sketch.

Address comments on Sketch and repeat all these steps.

Figma is better than Sketch + InVision + Abstract not because of the multiplayer editing feature (although that is pretty cool), but because it removes all layers of abstraction throughout the workflow. A Figma screen is always the underlying real, editable design regardless of how the user is experiencing it.

Looking for references

Not a lot of companies share publicly how they organize their work, especially at mid/large sizes. Some exceptions to the rule:

Spotify’s ways of working — a good example of a scalable model, with emphasis on discoverability and sustainability.

Dropbox’s design tooling at scale — their Sticker Sheet approach makes iterations faster by peeling away complexity and making sure the most popular components are easy to find and use.

Figma teams

Each product area (a navigation item in Klaviyo) got assigned a “Team” on Figma, but with some grouping optimizations that we plan to introduce to our navigation sometime in the future: