Comment by Hammershaft
6 days ago
Exploratory design isn't for crafting padding overwrites and call to action tweaks...
It's for thinking from first principles about the problems users face, and how to shape the products we create to best help those users overcome their problems. This means reconsidering faulty assumptions about the nature of the problem users face & the shape of the product that best solves that problem.
I hate this shift of the role of design in software towards trivial aesthetic fixations.
Design should be a shared discipline that orients product development towards greater value for users, but as of late it's mostly a trendy & low value extension of marketing.
Visual design, interactive design and information architecture are all lumped together under UX, but there's little call for going back to first principles when you have an established design system.
When you do, you end up with prototypes that are disconnected from what exists, and don't look good when you actually start using the existing visual design system. That's where all the one-off tweaks start coming in.
Unless the business is willing to pay for research into a holistic change to the semantics of the existing design system, Figma is perfectly suitable for the majority of design work once a cohesive design language has been put together.