I was working on a class assignment in UI/UX engineering when we were tasked with creating a wireframe for an app we were designing for our software engineering team. I was excited to work on creating a wireframe as I have never completed such a task before, and learning something new is always a fun experience for me. The website we were assigned to work on was Figma. Figma is a collaborative website for prototyping apps and websites with a team that can be worked on live, akin to multiple users on a Google Document.
Knowing this, I expected Figma to be very simple to use, as the purpose it was made for was what I was trying to achieve. However, I was unfortunately wrong. I came across many issues with consistency, where similar actions did not behave the same across the website, which made the experience frustrating to use. Starting on the wireframe I was working on, I decided I wanted to change the text of the URL for the home page of the website I was working on.
To change the URL, I let intuition guide me, since after working on many websites that are made for editing designs, I expected Figma to follow the same course of action. I focused on the URL in this window and double-clicked the text, which allowed me to edit it.
I was eager to see that Figma followed the same principles as many other websites, so I believed this to be a simple experience in the future. I now want to change the browser title, so following the affordances , which are visual cues that suggest how something can be used, made me believe that the browser title should be editable in the same way as the URL.
However, I was wrong. No matter what I did, I could not change the text at all. I double-clicked, I searched through the properties of the text on the right menu bar, I tried what seemed to be everything and nothing. I was only allowed to change the text's font. This wasn’t the only time this happened, either. As I added more templates, the more text I needed to edit. Some could be changed with a simple click, while others would have the same problem of only changing the font. This was a very frustrating issue to come across because a lot of the templates I used ended up having both editable text and text that couldn't be edited. This drastically decreased learnability , which is how easy it is for a user to understand and use a system over time.
Not only that, it wasn't just the text that was an issue! There were many issues with shrinking wireframes, exporting, and grouping. Having many inconsistent traits like this allows for a messy experience.