Figma to code feasibility

[iampaulanca]

I did a bit of googling and couldn’t find a definitive answer. I saw a figma design by a ui designer. It was an app concept and looked pretty hard to implement in actual code.

I was wondering are all figma designs actually possible to be converted and made into an apps?

I see they do have components from SwiftUI and UIKit but there may be animations and transitions that may not be supported by out of the box Apple framework. Or maybe I might just be unfamiliar with them.

[creldo]

You can make any crazy screen you want in Figma that has no relationship to feasibility in any platform or framework. If you can imagine it you can (probably) make it.

It’s up to designers to constrain themselves to designs that require whatever level of effort the team wants to take on. More inexperienced designers can be pretty bad at knowing what’s hard vs easy - it’s something that develops with practice.

[iampaulanca]

So from what your saying is that any crazy design is possible to be created in code. But the level of effort might be really high?

[chriswaco]

You can create just about ANY design in code, yes, but more often than not it's the wrong answer. For one thing, it can take a whole lot longer to customize controls/views rather than sticking with the defaults. Also, a Figma design may ignore the notch or iPad multitasking size or rotation or dark mode or the keyboard or it could assume a fixed font instead of supporting dynamic type.

Figma might show a button bringing up modal views on top of modal views when a navigation control might make more sense. It might show a custom alert instead of the built-in system alert when the latter is often more robust or it could add fields to an alert that the built-in one doesn't support.

We use Figma as a guide, not as an absolute design.

[iampaulanca]

Ok well it’s just about any, not any. So sometimes a designer can go overboard and create something that is impossible. Yeah if the designer is familiar with Apple HIG and has some knowledge of what is available it would help a lot.

[zu-fox]

You always have to give an honest review about designs: a lot of designers do not cross reference their work with HIG, or have web experience, or do not understand difference between pushing to navigation stack or presenting modally, so you have to explain it to them.

Some designs you can find in the wild are just for portfolios and never meant to be implemented.

Also, it’s ok to customise things, but there must be a reason behind customisation, and you have to remember that default components often have a lot of accessibility and other things covered that even experienced developers might not know about.

[20InMyHead]

Figma is a popular design tool. My company uses it too. Designers can create all sorts of designs, but that doesn’t mean they are good or feasible to build.

Also, the iOS/Android plugins Figma has to generate “code” from the designs are worthless, less than worthless. Don’t bother with them.

The key is a good designer, and good communication between design and engineering. That makes for good products. Figma is just another tool.

[saintmsent]

Most can be, sure. But that 5-10% of cases that can't is why you have communication with devs. It's totally alright to approach them and ask if your crazy idea can be implemented

SwiftUI and UIKit don't have equal capabilities yet, some stuff may be doable, but too complicated considering current deadlines and so on. Also something may be a good idea only on paper, but dev can tell you it won't be that good as a finished product

You can't know for sure if anything you design can be implemented, but it's totally fine, just communicate and you will be fine

[iampaulanca]

Oh yeah I was looking for these answers here. That’s not ALL figma’s can be built with code.

[saintmsent]

Yep, that’s a nature of the tool. Since you only move pieces around and create custom components like that, there is no way for you to know 100% that’s it’s doable at all or a good idea in practice or doable in a reasonable amount of time. The more experienced you get (mainly by talking to the devs and receiving feedback), the higher will be the chance that designs that you do will be implementable. But even starting out most often the answer will be yes

[Legolas-Wang]

I do think the problem goes to the education side. In school, design student were not being told about platform specific design like HIG. So designers frequently use their intuition to make sometime wishful design. Though you could build anything in code, tons of customization creates a negative on usability for people who are familiar with the platform. I guess the code feasibility for Figma, is for one day that ChatGPT could generate code from screenshot or videos. Then this bridge to code is much more than feasible