Bersabel Tadesse, Product Manager at Figma, shares behind-the-scenes of adding plugins and widgets to FigJam.

3rd-party developers can now build plugins and widgets for FigJam. Plugins in FigJam work similarly to Figma, and existing Figma plugins can even be republished for FigJam. Widgets are more like native FigJam objects — similar to sticky notes, shapes, and connectors — except they’re custom and built by you. For now, this API is in closed beta, but it creates an incredible opportunity for building almost anything inside FigJam.

A recap of the updates to Figma and FigJam that were shipped last month.

The product design team at Figma shares how they use FigJam, their online whiteboard, to be more generative as a team and with their cross-functional partners. Make sure to also check out the full livestream of the conversation and the community file with some of the components they use.

“Let your users know they’ve got notifications with this Animated Bell Icon that starts out in Figma, gets sent to After Effects to be animated, then exported as a Lottie file.”

Hover over the quick create icon on a shape or sticky to see a preview of what will be created, or drag it to add connectors between shapes. See a quick demo by Ana Boyer.

Figma hosted the Maze team to discuss the best practices for all things user research, building a robust product process centered on insights, and how best to your Figma files for scale.

“Learn some FigJam shortcuts, bring FigJam stickies into Figma, change the colors, copy-paste stickies as action items in Asana or a list in text-based applications.”

Template for running an asynchronous and remote design sprint in FigJam.

“In this Figma Tip, we create an Auto Layout chat bubble to be used in FigJam. Chat bubbles outlined in this tip and some additional Auto Layout notecards can be downloaded and reused from a community file.”

Karen Liu shares the pains of using Sketch + Abstract combo and why her team at Brave embraced Figma, even while it meant completely rebuilding the design system.

Set a shared timer in FigJam to keep brainstorms, retros, and workshops on track. (See the demo below.)

“Long before we launched FigJam in beta, teams across Figma had been using it for everything from user research to Maker Week projects. Here, Product Manager Emily Lin shares how she and the PM team at Figma use FigJam, along with templates to get you started.”

“Last week, we launched a timer in FigJam, allowing you to start, stop, and pause activities as a team. There are so many ways to work collaboratively in FigJam, so we talked to Figmates across the company to learn how they come together in the file.”

“FigJam was built as a space for teams to ideate together, so we wanted to dive a bit deeper into the earliest stage of collaboration: brainstorming. Product Marketing Manager Wayne Ng spoke to Cristen Torrey on the research team and Andrea Helmbolt on the growth marketing team to get their tips on running and facilitating an effective brainstorm.”

Miguel with a nifty tip. (Makes me curious why it’s not in the menu?)

“A brief introduction to the new whiteboard timer available in FigJam. Great for timed group activities, breakout sessions, and meetings. Timer is multiplayer and global for everyone in the document.”

“Make a placeholder PNG graphic in Figma Design for use in FigJam templates. This is great for setting up FigJam files for group activities and team meetings to help your collaborators easily place images into preset spaces.”

An interesting new app for creating and editing Lottie animations without After Effects. Supports importing assets from Figma.

Miguel shows how to add file thumbnails from Figma to FigJam files.