Behind the feature: comments, contextually | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma’s Community comments feature was designed to turn a mostly one-way publishing platform into a space for direct creator–audience communication. The team combined general feed comments with spatial, in-editor-style comments, while carefully adapting interactions to preserve the file-viewing experience. Technical constraints mattered, but the hardest work involved resolving subtle interaction and edge-case decisions. ## Why Community Comments Were Needed - Community users could browse, duplicate, and install resources, but had no straightforward way to contact creators. - Figma wanted the Community to support deeper engagement through questions, feedback, and discussion. - The feature introduced two comment types: - **General comments**, displayed in a feed beneath the file. - **Contextual comments**, attached to specific locations within the design. ## Adapting the Existing Commenting System - The team initially expected to reuse Figma’s existing in-editor comments with minor changes. - They replaced the previous iframe-based file preview to enable communication of viewport information. - They also had to consider performance when files contained many comments. - The larger challenge was interaction design: - Community files traditionally supported one-way creator-to-audience communication. - Comments created a two-way channel between audiences and creators. - Contextual comments required spatial navigation rather than a simple linear feed. - Users needed to inspect comment locations while still being able to pan across the canvas. - The team aimed to encourage commenting without diminishing the existing view-only experience. ## Exploring the User Experience - Engineering, design, and product worked in a close feedback loop. - Designers used animated prototypes and GIFs rather than only static wireframes because commenting depended heavily on interaction behavior. - Explorations considered: - Sidebar comment feeds. - Different ways to embed comments around the viewer. - Mini-viewers and canvas interactions for locating comments. - Prototypes helped the team evaluate ideas against technical feasibility, UI edge cases, and the launch schedule. ## Launch Priorities and Design Decisions The team prioritized three goals: - Make entering the commenting experience quick and intuitive. - Give contextual comments enough surrounding space to understand their position in the file. - Deliver a technically feasible, appropriately simple solution within the project timeline. As a result, contextual comments were limited to fullscreen view, where users had enough space to understand the design context. Clicking the minimized canvas expanded it into fullscreen mode, while clicking and panning were disabled in the smaller preview to avoid compromising the primary browsing experience. The feature ultimately required more than porting existing code: it demanded a new interaction model for combining comments, spatial context, and file browsing. Figma’s approach shows the importance of iterative cross-functional prototyping when adapting a familiar feature to a fundamentally different product environment.