Intro to FigJam

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FigJam is an excellent digital white-boarding tool made by the folks at Figma.

What is Figma?

Figma is a a modern, collaborative design tool that’s become an industry standard for a lot of software product teams. Designing with Figma is outside this doc, but it’s good to understand a few of the things that differentiate it from other design tools before we look at FigJam:

It’s specifically designed for user interface design, and has a lot of features aimed at creating shareable, structured design systems which make it easy for software teams to experiment and prototype fast (why so many teams love it).
It’s entirely cloud based, which means all your files are stored inside Figma and you can use it in a browser as well as through the app.
It’s multiplayer by default. A bit like google docs, multiple people can work simultaneously in the same file, and everyone can see what’a happening in realtime.

What is Figma (1:30)

The folks at Figma realised that a lot of teams weren’t just using it for design… they were using the collaborative features to run interactive, remote white-boarding sessions. So they created a tool specifically designed for this… FigJam.

What is FigJam?

FigJam is Figma’s answer to digital whiteboarding tools like Miro. It’s simple to use and is perfect for collaborating in a remote environment. Watch the video below to get an idea of how it works.

Welcome to FigJam (1 min)

Why do we need an online whiteboarding tool?

For many folks, visual thinking is the easiest way to come up with and organise thoughts, and in a group setting it’s often the most efficient way of ideating, sharing and organising ideas. There are lots of reasons for this, but put simply…

We form shared mental models faster when thinking & communicating visually (”a picture paints a thousand words”). We also tend to be better at creatively organising (and reorganising) things when they’re represented visually. In an office environment, how often have you reached for a notebook or whiteboard in the middle of a conversation?

There’s a reason most workshop facilitators make heavy use of whiteboards, flip-charts and sticky notes!

In a remote environment we don't have whiteboards and sticky notes, so we need a digital solution. In many ways, digital tools like Figma are better than real life. They allow us to include videos, text, code, images, designs etc alongside our sticky notes and whiteboard scribbles. They’re also better for large groups – so long as it’s well designed, it’s possible for a hundred people to collaborate on the same digital whiteboard at the same time.