Figma, maker of the web-based, collaborative interface design platform of the same name, has announced a raft of new updates to its FigJam whiteboarding platform, including new templates and integrations designed to improve productivity and make collaborating more fun.

Launched in April 2021 as a spinoff tool to facilitate the conversations and collaboration efforts users were having on the Figma platform, FigJam aims to support ideation and brainstorming through user flows and basic diagrams.

As Figma started to expand into the whiteboarding space, the company has seen teams that wouldn't be traditional Figma customers use FigJam for everything from hosting team rituals to planning, ideation and diagramming explained Jillian Latimer, product marketing manager at FigJam.

"We really see [FigJam] as this conversation canvas, a space where it's not just brainstorming or diagramming happening, but where teams define ideas, align on decisions and then move plans forward, all together in one place," she said. "It becomes this space where people are able to have conversations, work together and have a common ground for collaboration throughout the product development process."

Latimer says the company wanted to focus on improving efficiency and enabling teams to stay more aligned from the first idea to final delivery.

Templates, integrations streamline workflow

New custom templates are designed to make it easier to recycle and create templates that anyone in an organization can use, allowing teams to standardize the way they work. Meanwhile, new integrations with products from UserTesting, a maker of customer-feedback software, and Productboard, a creator of collaboration applications, aim to allow organizations to bring their conversations in those products directly into FigJam. Users will also be able to turn ideas captured on stickies into Productboard notes via a new widget.

The other new features were born out of the driving principles behind FigJam - the company's strong emphasis on fun and playfulness.

With its latest round of platform updates, FigJam has sought to push this element of fun even further by giving users the ability to use team face stamps to attribute and assign objects to team members and use emojis to react to other people's ideas. Companies will also be able to set their brand colors as the default for files to make spaces that are more personalized.

Users will be able to choose from a selection of preset music tracks that will play for a set period of time while they are working on a file. The same track will play for everyone in the file but users can control their own music volume and can mute it for themselves. Anyone in the file can set or change a music track.

"We're really trying to look for ways we make [FigJam] a little bit more human," Latimer said. "We want to set ourselves apart from the bullets and blankness of a paper document."

Adobe's$20B planned acquisition of Figma under scrutiny

In September 2022, Adobe announced it would be acquiring Figma for$20 billion, although the deal has faced a number of regulatory hurdles including an investigation by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the European Commission."Figma's web-based, multiplayer platform can accelerate the delivery of Adobe's Creative Cloud technologies on the web, making the creative process accessible to more people," said David Wadhwani, Adobe executive vice president and chief business officer for digital media, when the deal was announced.