Innovative Navigation in Presentation Tool Development

This chapter explores the evolution of a distinctive navigation feature in a presentation tool, highlighting the shift from an infinite grid to a single slide view. The speakers discuss initial challenges in prototyping key functionalities and emphasize the importance of user comfort throughout the iterative development process.

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Supported by Our Partners

• Graphite — The AI developer productivity platform.

• Sonar — Code quality and code security for ALL code.

• Chronosphere — The observability platform built for control.

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How do you take a new product idea, and turn it into a successful product? Figma Slides started as a hackathon project a year and a half ago – and today it’s a full-on product, with more than 4.5M slide decks created by users. I’m joined by two founding engineers on this project: Jonathan Kaufman and Noah Finer.

In our chat, Jonathan and Noah pull back the curtain on what it took to build Figma Slides. They share engineering challenges faced, interesting engineering practices utilized, and what it's like working on a product used by millions of designers worldwide.

We talk about:

• An overview of Figma Slides

• The tech stack behind Figma Slides

• Why the engineering team built grid view before single slide view

• How Figma ensures that all Figma files look the same across browsers

• Figma’s "vibe testing" approach

• How beta testing helped experiment more

• The “all flags on”, “all flags off” testing approach

• Engineering crits at Figma

• And much more!

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