You’re designing a complex healthcare dashboard filled with multiple widgets, graphs, and tables. Typically, you’d spend hours arranging these elements to ensure everything is aligned and responsive. Figma’s Suggested Auto Layout feature can analyse your design and automatically create the correct layout structure, saving you all that manual effort. This allows you to focus more on important design decisions rather than on tedious adjustments to spacing and alignment.
I recently worked on a healthcare app project where we had to design a dashboard featuring over 30 different data visualisations. What would normally take an hour to organise was completed in just minutes, thanks to Figma’s auto layout suggestions.
Now, imagine you’re in a client meeting, presenting static mockups for early feedback, and the client asks, “What happens if I click here?” Ordinarily, you’d have to go back, manually create the prototype, and send it over later. But with Quick-Click Prototyping, you can instantly turn those static designs into interactive prototypes right there in the meeting, allowing you to gather feedback immediately and make adjustments on the spot.
While Figma’s new AI tools are designed to streamline workflows, experienced designers who are already using plugins might feel that some of these updates are more evolutionary than revolutionary. Nevertheless, features like the Suggested Auto Layout and the paused Text-to-Design tool could be transformative once fully implemented. There’s real potential here, although some areas still need further development.
Figma’s AI tools have great potential to streamline many of the repetitive tasks we, as designers, deal with daily. Features like Suggested Auto Layout, Generate Designs from Text Prompts, and Replace Text Content with AI have the potential to dramatically speed up the design process, allowing us to focus more on creativity and problem-solving. While some tools still need refinement and others feel similar to existing plugins, these updates are certainly a step in the right direction.
Pros
Suggested Auto Layout: This is a major time-saver. It intelligently arranges your design elements into auto layouts, which is particularly useful for more complex projects. I tested it on a fintech app dashboard, and it quickly nailed the layout structure. If it performs well on larger projects, it could significantly improve my workflow.
Generate Designs from Text Prompts The ability to turn text descriptions into editable designs is incredibly helpful for quick brainstorming. Imagine describing the layout of a landing page and having Figma mock it up instantly for you. Unfortunately, this feature has been paused due to its similarity to Apple’s Weather app, but once it’s back, it will be a real game-changer for quickly generating mockups.
Visual Search For large teams with numerous components, this feature is invaluable. You can search for specific elements by image, which is perfect when you’re trying to locate the right asset in a vast project. I’ve worked on platforms where this feature would have saved a significant amount of time spent searching for components.
Replace Text Content with AI If you’re designing multiple assets, AI can automatically populate text across all of them. This is a simple yet effective time-saver, allowing you to concentrate more on the design rather than on repetitive text entry.
Quick-Click Prototyping Imagine being in a client meeting and instantly transforming static designs into interactive prototypes. This feature allows you to do just that, making it easier to receive immediate feedback. However, I’m cautious about how much manual tweaking might be required afterwards.
Cons
Familiar Features: Some of these new AI tools feel like polished versions of existing plugins. For instance, the Rename Layer tool is essentially the same as the Autoname plugin. While these features are helpful, they don’t feel particularly groundbreaking.
Paused Text-to-Design Feature The Generate Designs from Text Prompts tool has great potential, but with the rollout paused, we’ll have to wait to see how effective it truly is. It could have been a massive time-saver for early-stage designs.
Background Removal – Not New Background removal has been available in plugins for a while now. Figma’s version, while convenient, doesn’t feel like a significant upgrade from what we’ve had before.
Scepticism Around Quick-Click Prototyping While Quick-Click Prototyping is a fantastic concept, I’m unsure how much manual adjustment will be needed after generating the prototype. If too many tweaks are required, sticking to traditional methods might still be the better option.
Privacy Concerns with Visual Search Visual Search is excellent for large teams, but searching through Figma Community files does raise some privacy concerns, especially if sensitive designs are unintentionally shared or accessed.