Designers don’t have a natural urge to branch.

It’s undoubtedly spectacular that designers can tinker around in their

Branching in design tools is essentially a borrowed concept from tools like Github, where developers often branch from master before they start to work on a new feature. But to designers, branching not only allows them to work without disturbing existing work but also provides a safe space to explore and iterate without attracting judgment.

Figma recently lost it’s Beta tag for its branching feature, and added a bunch of features like branch review and suggestions. If you are unaware of how branching works in Figma, then you can check out these deep dive videos by the

Ok, back to the maturity of Figma branching as a feature.

When Figma announced the removal of the Beta tag, it meant the team had solved all the bugs, there won’t be many hotfixes in the future, and designers won’t lose their work in the progress of branching and merging. But the team at Figma left a lot of open-ended items still in their feature release. So let’s discuss them one by one:

Branch Review

Although Figma released the review and suggestions as part of their post-beta features, submitting pin-pointed reviews is quite a task in itself. As you can see from the screenshot above, recommendations get made by filling a text field that is not very intuitive. In addition, it would be 10x better if Figma allowed reviewers to place location-specific comments as part of the review process. And the tool picks those comments as part of the overall suggestion process. Not the other way around.

But to accomplish this, Figma needs to have a way to initiate the comments feature from the review/suggest dialog. I believe this will improve the experience for both the initiator and the reviewer. Currently, it’s a bit clumsy to comments all over the file, and then remember to compile those comments in the suggestion box.

Compulsory Branching

Although Figma has a branching feature, no one seems inclined to use it 🤯. Why is that? That’s because Figma’s interface attracts quick edits from the get-go. Designers open the file, make corrections, share the node links with the team, and that’s the end of Figma's work. Hence, branching in Figma is a volunteer feature used by a selected few. Unfortunately, there can never be a 100% adoption even if the users intend to because Figma doesn’t prioritize it.

As a designer, I understand there is a place for making elaborate edits or additions to the file, and then there are quick one-click changes that designers tend to do often. But in the past, I have seen myself requesting team members to use branches while making Design System changes (even if they are small), and at times, I procrastinated in opening a new chapter for doing small changes. So, even if it is the right thing to do, branching in Figma is not always welcomed by all the designers.

One way to tackle this issue is to have an option to make branching compulsory for specific projects or all files within a team. Figma can give this control within the admin setting, so it doesn’t get toggled very often. It can be used on Github for ages now. For instance, developers in Github cannot immediately start making changes to the master code after opening the IDE (integrated development environment). Instead, they must always begin with a branch, put-up their branch for code review, fix issues raised by the tech lead, and merge the branch after approval. This feature can do wonders for file management, particularly when it comes to Design Systems edits.

This enhancement will also mean that if a lousy branch merges, designers no longer have to rely on auto-saved versioning, and the admin can quickly reverse all changes within a branch with higher confidence.

Ticket Link-back

Designers are free to name their branches as they like. They can use an emoji in it or stick to only text. But since work in the product design industry happens via JIRA tickets, there should be a way for designers to provide a reference link to the JIRA ticket, Trello, or even Notion page. This way visiting the ticket from the branch description can be more accessible. It’s a win-win for designers, developers, and product managers since they are all found hovering around Figma files.

❤️ for Figma

As someone spending a lot of time playing around with Figma branches, I think the branch review feature that allows users to overlay original and changed screens over each other is stellar. It comes in handy when reviewing complex screens with minimal changes that get missed using just a side-by-side eye check.

As with this feature, I look forward to Figma improving its branching and merging capabilities even further as time goes by. Overall, I have noticed that the

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