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Thoughts on new Figma slides?

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Software Engineer at Taro Community2 months ago

I've heard a lot of discourse about how Figma Slides is a game changer and a huge deal for Figma because of it. I hear people say this is disruptive and an excellent case study in product. I've kinda used figma here and there but never really for a lot.

Thoughts? Is it something useful for you? Is it actually a game changer?

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Discussion

(4 comments)
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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    2 months ago

    I use Figma for YouTube thumbnails, and I like its simplicity. For Taro courses, we just use Google Slides.

    Since there is a switching cost to learn new software, I don't have a strong need to switch off Google Slides to Figma. This could be really interesting for their enterprise motion though -- most designers are already using Figma for mockups, so it makes sense to bundle in the slides for presentations.

    Are there any killer features that differentiate it from another slide maker?

    • 0
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      Software Engineer [OP]
      Taro Community
      2 months ago

      Their AI rewrite is solid and I would actually use it, they have really good templates and overall it feels less "presentation"-ey and more like those neat slides you see when companies present products during WWDC and such

  • 0
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    2 months ago

    They look slick, but there's another upstart competitor doing Google Slides but with better UI/UX: Canva. I skimmed through the video and it doesn't seem much better than Canva.

    Overall, it seems like a good tool but I really doubt it'll change the industry for 2 reasons:

    1. Switching is hard - This is both from the company perspective (they need to change contracts and go through finance/legal/compliance/privacy) and the employee perspective (need to rebuild muscle memory on where all the right buttons are). Because of the latter, I'll be sticking with Google Slides.
    2. Bundling - Both Google and Microsoft have a slides product that's bundled into their overall workspace offering, making their option the default as it's already there. Since they're massive Big Tech companies who are grossly profitable, they can also easily compete on price if Figma does gain significant traction. Bundling is why companies often times use worse products (we did this at Robinhood with our performance review feedback tool, moving over to the one that's part of Workday instead).
    • 1
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      Software Engineer [OP]
      Taro Community
      2 months ago

      I believe switching is hard is the reason why its good. Apparently a lot of people used to use Figma as an ad-hoc presentation but building slides natively helps solve this pain point for a lot of product people who already use Figma

Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The feature set of Figma focuses on user interface and user experience design, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration, utilising a variety of vector graphics editor and prototyping tools.
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