I stopped trying to learn Figma

Hi,

In the last edition, I talked about the gap. Everything clear in my head, and nothing translating properly on screen. I was spending hours in Figma trying to produce something usable, and most of those hours felt like fighting the tool rather than building the product.

So I kept at it for a few more weeks. I watched tutorials. I learned shortcuts. I understood more of the design system that was already in place. And I got better. Slowly, genuinely better.

But better was not the point. Speed was.

Every hour I spent becoming a passable Figma user was an hour not spent on product decisions, on user research, on the hundred other things that actually move nused forward. I was optimizing for the wrong thing. Trying to become someone I do not need to be, instead of finding a way to get what I actually needed.

The realization came quietly, not dramatically. I was describing a screen to Claude in a conversation, explaining the flow, the logic, the constraints. And what came back was closer to what I had in my head than anything I had managed to produce in Figma after hours of work.

Not pixel-perfect. Not final. But readable. Usable. Something I could react to.

That is exactly what I was missing.

Then I talked to Sergei.

Turns out he had his own version of the same problem. As a backend developer, Figma was just as foreign to him. So he had been taking my Figma files and running them through ChatGPT to convert them into HTML before he could actually work with them. An extra step, every time, just to translate something I had spent hours producing into something he could use.

We had both found workarounds. We just had not talked about it yet.

Once we did, the fix was obvious. I now produce HTML directly with Claude. Sergei uses it directly. The intermediate step is gone. The whole loop is faster.

Is it perfect? No. But here is the thing: Figma was not going to be perfect either. It was just going to be slower.

There is something uncomfortable about admitting this. It feels a bit like giving up on learning the right way. But the more honest version is this: I was solving the wrong problem. The problem was never that I could not use Figma. The problem was that I needed a faster bridge between what is clear in my head and something another person can look at and respond to.

That bridge exists now. It just does not look like what I expected.

I have been building nused in whatever space I can find. Dog walks. Hockey rink. Late evenings. The tools should follow the same logic. Not the most professional setup. Just the one that actually works given the time and energy I have.

And right now, this one works.

Back to it.

Cédric