Figjam widget: Figjam <> Canvas become 1?
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Steve Wikeley
I often find designers not using the canvas board - and instead exporting the highlights to figjam - affinity mapping (and often doing this with a wider stakeholder group than people who would be in Dovetail as the ramp up to use Dovetail has a higher complexity as well as them not having licences) making user journey maps there. And to be honest it's hard to defend use the Dovetail canvas board instead - as typically they do all their discovery in Figjam - diagrams, ideation etc. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could build a Figjam widget / integrationy thingy which brought in all the highlight from a given project and synced with the canvas in some way.
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Jazmin Taheri
Merged in a post:
I feel like Bambie on Ice using this whiteboard
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Sean Conlon
I have used many whiteboards like Miro, Figjam and Canva, and Dovetail's is by far not just the most feature lacking but also so clunky. When trying to move large amounts of sticky notes it feels so slow, I feel like if I make one small move I will mess things up. Happy to hop on a call at any point to explain things further as I do love using the tagged highlights but it's been a pain going from raw data to insight.
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Martina Biller
Agree, I just had the request from our designer if it is possible to copy hightlights of the cansas to Figjam
Pat Barlow
Great to hear your perspective, Sean Conlon! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide specific examples of the features you find lacking in our whiteboard compared to others like Miro, Figjam, and Canva?
- Could you elaborate on the issues you face when moving large amounts of sticky notes? Are there specific actions that feel particularly slow or difficult?
- You mentioned a difficulty in going from raw data to insight. Could you describe your ideal workflow for this process?
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Arvind Venkataramani
Pat Barlow I'm not specifically advocating for Figjam integration, but here are some frictions I've faced navigating Canvas
- navigation: modal pan and item dragging means I am constantly having to hit V, then H, then V, then H over and over again in the span of a few seconds. given that zoom is not modally locked this makes for a very confusing interaction. Figjam does this well by offering a mouse mode where right-click + drag does pan, left-click interacts with objects. Yes this is usable on modern laptop trackpads as well.
- no / extremely limited shape primitives: it's visually restrictive to only use groups; can't draw lines to connect concepts / themes, etc.
- no stickies or obvious annotation object
- text boxes are frustrating to use: the default is not text but headings (and given the lack of stickies I'm going to use text far more than headings). the format control is BELOW the text box, which is bad because it consistently obscures text I'm typing and though the text box eventually resizes vertically after I click away, I can never see more than a few words of any additional words I type each time I edit a text box
- when adding highlights, they go into a default location on canvas often far away from what I'm actually viewing instead of appearing in the viewport
- Dragging an item outside the viewport doesn't move the viewport in that direction; the view does not follow the mouse cursor to keep it visible
I only use canvas because of the ability to do note/tag based clustering, and because I'm often revising my tags as I am clustering / building themes. Those are useful and critical capabilities, but the clunkiness of the interaction design makes it really hard to get into flow. Everything I've described above is an easy fix that will improve quality of life considerably, I'm hoping you don't ignore those before attempting integrations.
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Pete Savigny
I second this, and add that this would be important also for Miro.