Little Big Updates: Dispatches from Quality Week | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma’s Quality Weeks dedicate focused time to bugs, edge cases, and features that technically work but feel broken. The post argues that software quality is not defined only by code correctness: browser behavior, user expectations, perceived responsiveness, and inconsistent support can all make a product feel buggy. Small fixes—sometimes only a few lines of code—can therefore have disproportionately large effects. ## Quality Week and the macOS Accent-Menu Bug - Figma periodically holds Quality Weeks to address forgotten bugs, oddities, and issues outside normal feature work. - A macOS accent-menu problem caused letters to repeat or fail to appear. - The issue involved the complex sequence of keyboard and text-input events handled by the operating system and browser before Figma received them. - Molly developed a fix of fewer than ten lines that worked in Firefox and Safari and supported both keyboard and mouse input. - Chrome, Figma’s most widely used browser, still exhibited the problem, showing that a technically correct fix may not solve the user-facing issue for most customers. - She also reported the underlying browser issue to Chrome developers for a possible future fix. ## The Difference Between a Technical Bug and a Real Bug - In theory, a bug consists of: - How the software is supposed to behave. - How its current behavior differs. - Real-world systems make those definitions ambiguous: - Intended behavior may not be clearly defined. - A perfect fix may be impractical or impossible. - Some problems require choosing a new, less-buggy direction rather than restoring the old one. - Historical examples such as Y2K, the Pentium FDIV error, and the Mars Climate Orbiter failure demonstrate that identifying a problem and knowing its cause does not automatically make it easy to resolve. - Figma treats issues as worthy of attention when they materially affect users, even if they do not fit a strict engineering definition of “bug.” ## When Missing Support Feels Like a Bug - HEIC image support illustrates the difference between “never implemented” and “broken” from a user’s perspective. - Figma’s inconsistent handling of HEIC files—especially images dragged from iPhones and iPads—made the product feel unreliable. - Sawyer added support in 98 lines of code. - The new support exposed a second usability problem: large, high-resolution HEIC files could take many seconds to process, during which the canvas appeared to ignore the drop. - Jackie identified that a loading state could communicate progress and prevent users from assuming the feature had failed. - The example shows that fixing one problem can reveal another, and that perceived responsiveness is part of product quality. Figma’s approach is to prioritize issues based not only on technical correctness but also on how users experience the product. Quality work should address the small inconsistencies that make software feel unreliable, particularly when a modest implementation can remove substantial frustration.