Dylan Field
speaker
223 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 May
Dylan Field’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Maybe. Yeah. It depends on the domain probably.
I have a few reactions. I think that the amount of software created will go vertical. I think that a lot of people make a lot more software. It doesn't mean it's good software. And I think that designers and people that are able to bring more craft to the equation, yeah, they bring that temporal, emotional, cultural context that can really differentiate something. And yes, I also believe that
There's more we can do to improve software development in general. That's why we, with Figma, have really tried to map out the process of software development. So we start with FigJam, brainstorming ideation. Then we go into Figma slides like alignment. We have Figma design for design and then dev mode for design to development and how to translate to developers.
Yeah, I definitely think that there's way more we can do to make it so that people are able to achieve even more and go through that loop of software development even faster. So that excites me a lot.
Say more. The transition to the next type of civilization that we might encounter, probably we like harness the energy of the sun by 2100. Or maybe it's not our sun, maybe we harness the energy of a neighboring sun. No need to mess with ours. But yeah, and you can do all sorts of interesting things. I think if you set that as the goal, maybe it becomes a lot sooner.
But I think certainly by 2100, we should be able to get there.
The beauty of digital right now is that it feels like anything is possible. And maybe that's the outlandish thing, period, is that we're getting to a place where I've kind of always felt like the approach should be, you can build anything that's not violating the laws of physics, given enough time. And now like the time portion of that even is decreasing on the digital side.
And certainly digital is not usually violating the laws of physics. So that's pretty exciting.
Whatever you're speaking to folks, I think you have to think about the audience. I would probably try to make this presentation for as general of an audience as possible. By definition, it wouldn't necessarily be graduate level in the first place, pushing us back into the premise. Sorry, I'm not your LM to prompt. Yum.
Yeah, I mean, I would try to basically encourage everyone to try to build design literacy and figure out how do you get better and increase your abilities in the field of design. And I think that if you look at the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders and certainly software, but also in hardware, they are becoming so much more design literate. And again, maybe it's selection bias.
I hear so many founders that tell me they start in Figma. And they're like in Figma design a lot of the time. They might not even have a designer on the team they aspire to, but they don't yet because they're just starting off. That's where a lot of folks live now is on this digital canvas trying to figure out how should something work.
And when I look at the future of people that will work in technology or folks that are going to be founders, when we look at the students that we reach with Figma through our EDU efforts. It's just incredible to see how advanced they are and how much they are deep diving on design as a discipline.
And I think that more than we ever could have imagined, it's becoming a skill that I hope one day it'll be more like listing Microsoft Word on your resume. Right now, people put Figma on their resumes. If you put Microsoft Word on your resume, it's kind of like a red flag. And I hope we get to that status. Because it's so obvious that you should know how to design things.
That doesn't mean you're going to be a writer, but everyone should be able to engage in this point of design.
Design principles span UX, but also visuals. They're very different when you're thinking about product versus branding. And so it depends a lot on what context we're talking about right now. I think if you're talking more on the software UX side, I would say the first things I see people mess up are when to reuse versus when to be inventive. There are plenty of patterns that users already know.
And sometimes it's very useful to be inventive and create new patterns. And that's why something can catch on. And sometimes it's not. I would say that people fail to consider flows. So a lot of times they don't think about where a user is coming from. They think only about a certain state that someone's in right now. And that context, if they lack it, can hurt them and hurt their experience.
I think that they often are too indirect. So they have complex ways of manipulating data where you have to manipulate it on maybe it's one screen over here and you have to go to a different screen to be able to see the effect or it's not all in one place. You can't get that call and response, that immediate feedback loop.
That doesn't mean that you have to be direct manipulation like a tool like Figma, but the closer you can get the manipulation to the effect, I think is better. And then I think more than 20 is the stuff that we try to meme-ify inside of Figma. Make the simple things simple, the complex things possible. And that's not an original Figmaism that goes back a long ways. Famous design quote.
But I would say that it's easy to just endlessly do what users want, add more power to applications, and then end up with something super complex that's not usable, not approachable. It's one of the biggest risks for Figma. that we're always trying to counterbalance is how to make sure that we're not too power user, despite people using us for powerful things.
That's something that we work on a lot as an organization.
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