An intro to building plugins for Figma with create-figma-plugin
After the launch of the Reciprocal.dev alpha late last year we took a step back and thought about the tools our potential customers would be using and how we could bring our visualisation techniques to where our users would be needing them most.
We started with a Miro plugin because we’d seen a lot of teams (including ones we were part of) using that tool to visualise and discuss user journeys, but after investing a month of development into building a Miro plugin I was really aware of how limiting the Miro SDK and API would be in delivering something valuable.
Instead of running ahead with the Miro plugin we thought about how people use Miro and realised that Miro isn’t really a source of truth, instead it’s where the ideation and discussion happen before the outcome is captured in a source of truth the team uses.
Figma is a platform we’d already been thinking of building a plugin for as we used it as a source of truth in our day jobs where a design agency would provide mockups for user stories ready for the team to implement.
A quick read of the Figma development documentation reassured me that I’d be facing a better development experience than Miro’s so we decided to invest some time in exploring that approach.
