November 27, 2023

Possible Enhancements for Variables in Figma That I Noticed

  • Shortcuts are not easily discoverable if there are any from the UI itself.
  • Show list of collections upfront instead of hidden behind the overflow menu, makes it difficult to go back and forth while defining variables.
  • "Create Variable" being the primary action is hidden at the bottom of the modal. It should also come with a shortcut.
  • It’s not clear when a group has nested groups until I hover on the name in the group list. The caret icon is hidden until I hover.
  • Option to bulk rename variables. Renaming takes up a lot of time when defining sets of variables. Eg. to create skyblue variable group, I duplicated teal group but had to rename each variable to teal skyblue individually
  • Option to create variable set based on logic. Eg. ('colourLight' = colourname-300 ; 'colourDark' = colourname-600 ; 'colourDarkest' = colourname-900) would lead to creating this set of 3 for a defined group of colours (teal, orange, pink etc) taking values from a different collection.
  • When publishing library, the variables shows hidden variables section even when there aren’t any in a collection.
  • When using variables, the menu doesn’t show the same levels of nesting as when defining them.