Today, I want to share new designs, resources, and news for UX/UI designers to help you stay more productive and bring new design solutions to your colleagues and clients.
Figma’s most powerful update
At the end of June, Figma announced a slew of new features. Three themes were emphasised:
- Making Figma easier for users to work in Figma
- Improving Dev Mode for Developers
- Introduction of AI with many automations.
What’s new with the introduction of AI?
- There is an improved Visual Search. It allows you to find any items — from icons to entire files. Now, it is enough to describe an object with text, insert a screenshot, a selected frame or a sketch created with the “Pencil” tool. Figma will automatically pick up similar projects from team files or from the Community to which you have access.
- Figma introduced an AI assistant capable of generating images and icons, removing backgrounds, writing, rewriting and translating text, and renaming layers in one click.
- The Make Designs feature has been introduced (temporarily disabled). With its help, it will be possible to create adaptive mockups of website and application interfaces and component variants based on text queries. You can change themes, colours, fonts, corner radii, and spacing in these layouts. This will help to easily customise the design according to the specifications and client requirements.
- Creating prototypes with transitions between screens and adaptability in one click is now possible. It is enough to select frames and click the Make Prototype button.
- Also of interest is the Replace Content function, which allows you to automatically fill duplicated components with text.
In addition, the design of Figma has changed:
- By moving the toolbar down, the workspace has been increased.
- Working with auto layouts with the new Suggest Auto Layouts feature has become more accessible. It automatically adjusts all objects within a frame to auto layouts.
- All corners of the elements are now rounded.
This is just a part of the changes; all of them will be implemented gradually, as the new UI3 interface is still in the testing phase.
Figma Slides presentation editor
Another major update that deserves attention is the Figma Slides presentation editor. The new tool’s arrival has been a long time coming, as last year, users made more than 3.5 million presentations in Figma.
The Figma Slides tool was out of beta at the time of the Config 2024 conference. It will be free until the end of 2024.
What’s of particular interest:
- Separate intuitive interface and view mode for individual slides and the whole presentation.
- Library with customisable templates.
- Style Picker that can instantly change colours and fonts throughout the presentation.
- Ability to create notes for slides.
- Slide animation.
- An AI assistant that can change the tone of voice of presentation text.
- Polls, voting and other audience engagement features.
- Online collaboration.
Try this tool if you often make presentations for your team or clients. It will definitely increase your productivity.
Framer Forms
Framer Forms is a convenient tool for creating dynamic and user-friendly data collection forms.
Forms offer an extensive set of features:
- 10+ input types: Meet any user needs with various options.
- Free Editing: Create custom input elements, focus states, select, select, load, success and more to suit your project.
- Data Flexibility: Choose methods for sending data, including email delivery, Google Sheets integration, or custom Webhooks.
- Built-in security: Forms protect your data with spam protection, query frequency limits, and a backup email address.
If you still need to try creating forms with it, experiment. It may be the tool you’ve been missing to be productive.
Gen-3 Alpha Text to Video
Runway has reported a new level of fast text to high-quality video conversion.
You can explore the new features at runwayml.com. This is a publicly available model, so its use has no restrictions. At first glance, the videos are very high quality and can replace stock videos.
Scene
Scene.io is a new design tool with a versatile workspace. When creating websites, you can use an AI-powered assistant with Muse. It helps create a short site description, analyse competitors, automatically create wireframes and write texts for site pages.
Another advantage is that you can work in Scene on the design with the whole team.
WebFlow Updates
Webflow has announced essential updates, improving design and development on the platform; here are some of them:
- Performance: Improved speed and responsiveness for large sites and improved performance in Designer.
- Components: You can add them to collection lists, connect data to properties, and use changeable placeholders for more flexibility.
- Google Analytics 4: updated integration to support the new analytics platform.
- Editor and Designer improvements: Updates have been made to improve the performance of the Webflow editor and Designer, speeding up tasks such as opening the Designer, loading projects, and working with grid layouts.
- Figma plugin: improved style compatibility between Figma layers and Webflow classes.
- Webflow Applications: Integrating applications such as Jasper AI, Finsweet Table, and Memberstack has accelerated workflows and improved user experience.
- Design System Management: A new “Designer” panel with improved features such as variables and custom CSS properties provides a consistent project style.
UX Lift
UX Lift has an exciting tool called UX Answers. It allows you to get answers to your UX questions with an AI-powered search.
That’s all the new products and updates I wanted to discuss today. If you, too, have encountered any exciting tools to work with, share them in the comments.
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New Summer UX/UI Tools and Updates for Productive Work was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.