Config Europe 2020
The event was hosted by Figma on 17 September 2020.
The event of Config Europe 2020 was announced by Figma on their Instagram account and other social media. All Figmates and the participants were hyped attending the virtual conference. The Figma team also invited us to join the community on Slack after we registered for the event. It was great! I was amazed by the number of communities on Slack. The community of Figma is called Friends of Figma. It’s a big community with a total of 6,204 members. They are lively! I love seeing their active discussions and reading various topics there as they’ve got a ton of incredible channels for us!
After the email received, the attendees were given three figma files. The files are Config Europe Companion, Friends of Figma Community Passport, and Friends of Figma Atlas. Let’s take a look at these files.
Config Europe Companion
This figma file contains a guideline to create name tag, update schedule, and create notes.
- Create name tag
I had some fun creating my own name tag as the team provides the samples of their name tag. The team’s name tags are unique and vibrant!
2. Update schedule
Figma as a host provided four different tracks during the event. They are color-coded throughout the program.
I prepared my own schedule but frankly, I had a hard time choosing the stages because of various interesting topics!
3. Take notes
The attendees can take notes during the event and the Figma team encouraged us to do so. We can share the takeaways with the rest of the community.
Friends of Figma Community Passport
I think this is my favorite part so far, creating the FoF Community Passport. The community made this project possible and created some templates so the attendees can share it on Slack or their social media. I was impressed by their creative ideas!
Friends of Figma Atlas
We can copy the thumbnail from the passport file and bring it to the Atlas map. Then travel a bit, and check out everyone else’s passports. In other words, the attendees can meet other Friends of Figma anywhere in the world.
I personally love this idea made by the Figma communities! We can see everyone’s thumbnails and which part of the globe they come. Interesting!
Let’s move on to the event!
I really enjoyed all sessions and everything was awesome from the opening session until the closing session. I got the awe by the quality talks provided by all speakers.
The opening keynote
Dylan Field, CEO at Figma, as the first speaker for the opening session he gave a talk about “Embracing the tension between code and design”. The highlighted point is adopting the rigor and reusability of code while preserving the rapid iteration and uninhibited exploration that makes visual design so powerful. Besides, he also announced new features in Figma that will bring the designers closer to code and make them intuitive to use, while more efficiently translating designs into production. You can read the full article written by Dylan here.
These features are:
- Variants (in November)
- Instance swap menu (launched on Sept 17th, 2020)
- Interactive components (January 2021)
- Auto layout updates (in November)
- Inspect tab (launched on Sept 17th, 2020)
As a Figma user, I can see the future of the new features because it will help the designers to work effectively and efficiently along with the developers. The attendees shouted out excitingly in the comment section when Dylan announced it. Me too, yep!
In case you’re curious about the details of these features, you can watch the full opening session here.
When localisation and design talk to each other
Anne-Sophie Delafosse, the Localisation Manager at Deliveroo, presented the topic regarding localisation. Deliveroo is passionate about food and bringing people evermore choice to their home. They are currently live in 12 markets, delivering restaurant food, grocery, and even pharmacy items. The application is available in 9 languages.
According to GALA, the Localisation Manager must have the ability to manage the work of internal teams and external suppliers located around the world. Daily work requires the management of linguistic, technical, and visual quality, coordination with client staff, the setting of budgets, and management of costs and motivation of team members. The correct project translation or localization strategy, as defined by the Localization Project Manager, can produce high impact results and can shorten localization time-to-market, reduce costs and help the client company achieve its global business objectives.
The product journey steps through localisation at Deliveroo is started from user research in markets, designing the product, building the product, and promoting the product. While they also do prototypes surveys, content review and design review, create dynamic content pluralisation, and the marketing assets.
She said that we might think it was a fairly good workflow seemed to be running yet it was actually not great. They wanted to change it because of these reasons:
- Too many manual tasks
- Workflow was too slow
- Localisation issues
- Localising prototypes wasn’t easy
Anne-Sophie wrote the comprehensive article on Medium regarding the localisation process. She said that localisation is a thought-after process, something you don’t need to think about until the very end. It can often be seen as a bottle-neck for product release. Hence, she wanted to change that mentality.
She contacted Phrase and requested a plugin that can be synced to Figma. This plugin allows us to push the keys, the content strings, and the screenshots in one go. It also allows us to pull back the translations so we can test our design in several languages. Cool, right?
She said that the team loved it because of faster build, less engineering time, and better localisation.
Inside Figma, a look into Figma product thinking
Sho Kuwamato, the Director of Product at Figma, presented the product thinking inside Figma.
Users ￫ Problems ￫ Solutions ￫ Map ￫ Principles
He said that we could help users by answering questions, debugging. their plugin issues, being as transparent as possible, and building features.
On the Map ￫ Principles phase, the aim is:
- Maximize the speed of design exploration
- Maximize creative freedom
- Allow users to structure design to match code
Bringing modern design to a 400 year old company
Angelo Arnis, Design Systems Lead at Posti Group, shared his experiences working at a 400 year old company in Finland.
Posti is the leading postal and logistics service provider in Finland. Their core business includes postal services, parcel and e-commerce as well as logistics solutions.
Moving forward to some changes is sometimes scary for us, not exceptionally the organisation. Angelo Arnis said it was critical to provide an end-to-end experience. His team started from scratch and defined their philosophy to provide it.
- Grow — Kasvata
- Delight — Ilahduta
- Reduce — Pelkistä
- Listen — Kuuntele
On the right, the terms is in Finnish. Interesting, right?
In order to do that, they structure their team to function around customer. They also collate the average of different journeys into what they call customer experience index.
Until we learn to measure what we value, we will continue to overvalue what we measure. — Kim Goodwin
He shared that as long as we have a version of the design system that feels better than the previous, then it scales.
I have explored Posti website and I personally love the clarity inside their website. Their brand illustrations systems also nicely represent the company’s brand.
Collaboration in product design
Olga Mishyna, the Lead Product Designer at Ayden, presented the topic regarding the collaboration in product design. That we should involve developers at the concept stage so we can have a lot of great feedback from our developers. Communication is key. As an example, we can learn from Google Ventures.
As the first step, we can start small. Change people’s minds one by one, the ripple effect happens!
Networking Session
I never felt so energize attending the networking session because I met awesome people there. During this session, each attendee is given 5 minutes of networking and it was chosen randomly. The people were nice by sharing their experiences at their work, their obstacles, their product, etc. These people are diverse; Lead Designer, UX Writer, Communication Designer, and UI Designer.
Unfortunately, I had to work on the design issues my team encountered at that time. Hence, I couldn’t attend the last session.
But, I was so excited by attending this event and being a member of the Friends of Figma. The Figma team nailed it! Thank you for hosting Config Europe 2020. A lot of takeaways learned from the speakers!
