Teaching a Figma Workshop for Non-Designers

Challenges

1. 1 Design team members were frequently pulled in to make minor changes to Figma files or for editing slide templates, leading to distractions and delays for other design work.
2. 2 Non-design team members needed to wait on the availability of a designer to make these minor changes, causing a bottle neck effect.
3. 3 Non-design team members wanted to get better at Figma but most tutorials, Figma Help docs, and Figma Community files were geared towards professional designers.

Design Approach

I hosted the workshop as a live session inside of Figma, to make sure that we were solving getting Edit access to Figma and getting their hands on the tool from the outset.

Most available Figma tutorials required a heavy time investment and were too complex for non-designer workflow needs. What my teammates really needed was guidance for these common questions: how do I export a file, how do I edit text, how do I insert an image, what are artboards, and troubleshooting help. For each section, I led a hands-on exercise so participants actually used the particular interface section we were talking through.

After running the workshop a few times, I found that keeping it to around 2-3 team members was the most effective structure that allowed enough room for specific questions, and that 1 hour was the best amount of time (30 minutes was too short).

The Impact

I received positive feedback from participants who both enjoyed the live learning session and said that they now felt less overwhelmed by Figma afer the workshop.

I published the workshop file to Figma Community along with workshop documentation. To date, it's been downloaded 1,000+ times and viewed 3,000+ times.