Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$144
per year
OpenText Vibe
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText Vibe (formerly Micro Focus Vibe) is a web-based team collaboration platform developed by Novell, and was initially released by Novell in June 2008 under the name of Novell Teaming. Novell's acquisition by Micro Focus was completed in April 2015.
Figma is a solid design tool to craft the UX design concepts/solutions for digital products. For printed marketing materials such as brochures, marketing flyers, press releases, etc, other design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign might make more sense to use for those use case scenarios.
How fast can I implement it fully for an organisation?
How many hours must I invest to get it up and running?
How does it compare to the competitors similar software?
Once up and running how much time and money will it cost me?
From the point of how it looks I would like to use it. As it is part of the Novell suite I would like to use it as I have already paid for it. So in conclusion with the help of Novell I might be able to implement it the way I want it but without extra cost.
You can create electronic forms with powerful workflows behind them. This allows for supervisor approval/rejection of forms. The workflows also allow for email alerts when certain stages are met.
Built in social media tools. Each employee has a feed which other employees can follow.
Allows employees to create teams in which they can chose members and rights.
Tappable overlaid layers - bugs on fixed components, such as an app navigation footer in a prototype
Swapping a component but retaining inputted copy or imagery.
Performance on prototypes to work better in UserZoom - having to delete hidden layers manually, optimize images, and streamline the file, in general, is time-consuming
Folder structures - larger teams need multiple layers of folder structure to help find things.
Branch performance - we need better, more user-friendly solutions to get designs to merge better.
Branch performance - branching with the option to choose which pages you want in the branch without deleting each page you don't need.
Default sharing options need improvement.
Responsive ratios' in prototyping without having to recreate pages.
Better collaboration with Jira to bring in links in the design mode not just dev mode.
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
We would never go back to a spreadsheet to manage our inventory! Since Vibe is essentially free for us there's no reason not to continue using it. We plan on rolling out more processes in other departments for the coming year. The biggest obstacle is change. People don't want to change doing things they have been doing for years. If the workflow saves time people will embrace it.
It's easy to use for designers who are familiar with design terms and functions from Photoshop and Illustrator. However, non-tech and non-designer collaborators have a hard time figuring out how to leave comments and apply changes, compared to other online design tools like Canva and Squarespace. Even simple drag-and-drops and rearrangement of certain blocks become too complicated due to uncommon functions like Hug and Lock.
At this moment it still looks you need to do a lot to be able to use it and to be honest that time should be used for work not for configuring a communication tool for the business. Yes I understand that it takes time to learn something to use in the organisation , but with this tool I see the help desk having to answer a lot of questions on how to use it or once someone has done something how to undo it.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
I learned UX Design using Sketch and my team was using Sketch when I joined. We no longer use Sketch, and therefore I cannot compare its current functionality to Figma, but at the time of our switch, Figma just had more advanced capabilities- better collaboration, auto-layout tools, prototyping, etc. From what I can tell, it remains best in class for UX Design tools.
I think the closest well known product that stacks up to Vibe is Microsoft SharePoint. But I really can't make a true comparison because when I tried SharePoint, I didn't know quite know where to start which really dissuaded me from exploring further. With SharePoint, I hear and see that it can do a lot of things, but I feel like I have to be a coder of some sort in order to know what to do. And the templates available to start from is far from what I actually need in order to be productive in my industry. What my team migrated from was an open source platform called Projectfork. I really loved that platform, but it is easy to break. So in search from something stable, I stumbled across Vibe. It gave me the features I was accustomed to having plus the reporting, improved document versioning, easier flow of setting up users and permissions, and push notifications.
