Digital Designers Take Professional Collaboration Tools and Riff on Them

“The tools are so streamlined, so I really like it because there’s not a lot of extra fuss—it’s just about the shape and colors,” said Ms. Wolf, a product designer at Netflix Inc.

Collaboration software has seen a boom in the pandemic, not only as a remote-work tool, but also in what one might call off-label uses. Online meetings on platforms like Zoom and Remo, for example, began occasionally giving way to happy hours and magic shows.

The companies providing these tools mostly market them as professional products, but they are also encouraging the extracurricular uses. Microsoft Corp. , for example, added virtual commutes to its Teams product. Adobe Inc. is testing a presentation plugin for its Adobe XD experience design product, which it hopes to roll out widely this year.

But users have their own ideas. Adobe XD, for instance, has been repurposed to create presentations for clients, for résumés and 3-D models for scientific inquiry. On the online whiteboard tool Freehand, from InVision App Inc., people play Pictionary and other drawing games. And Figma has been deployed beyond user-interface design to create pitch decks, interior design and off-site meetings.

Companies are expected to spend an estimated $162 billion this year in the global design industry, according to Forrester Inc. research, with about $36 billion on experience design software, $44 billion on consulting services and agencies and $81 billion on in-house designers.

Executives including chief information officers and chief marketing officers are investing more in design, said Andrew Hogan, principal analyst at Forrester. “It’s pretty safe to say it is two to four times bigger than it was five to 10 years ago,” he said of the design industry.

A lot of companies can’t hire enough designers, said Dylan Field, chief executive of Figma Inc. “They recognize if they don’t have good design, they will be disrupted.” Mr. Field uses Figma to play games with his team and even used it to help plan his wedding, he said.

As companies have focused more on design and Figma’s tools become more accessible, including on mobile devices, people have begun to use those tools in more ways, said Janvi Jhaveri, founder and chief executive of Jack Strategy LLC, a product design and strategy studio.

Tools like Figma and those from InVision help data and information come to life, and can easily become a habit, Ms. Jhaveri added.

“They become life-management tools,” she said.

Figma has been expanding on its namesake product since it was released for beta testing in 2015. The company encouraged a plugin ecosystem, allowing outside programmers and designers to offer software add-ons that work with the product, and in 2019 introduced Figma Community, which lets designers upload files for anyone to build on, play with or transform as they choose.

Figma closed its latest round of funding last April, raising $50 million for a company valuation of $2.05 billion, the company said.

It declined to say whether it is profitable.

During the past year of working from home, Figma’s collaborative capabilities made it possible for teams to feel like they were in the same room together, said Shannon Rhee, product designer at Brex Inc., a financial services company for small businesses.

Ms. Rhee uses Figma for day-to-day design work, she said. Last April, though, she also created a virtual off-site for the product design team, with rooms dedicated to team-building activities like drawing animals that team members asked for. But she has also used it to make birthday cards and others for employees.

She has also used Figma to help a friend plan the design of her apartment.

“It’s become a far more prevalent thing during the pandemic,” Ms. Rhee said of people using Figma for personal reasons. “I hadn’t really seen people use design tools for fun things like this in the past.”

And it may become more broadly used, she said. “It’s become a design tool that feels very accessible to non-designers,” she added.

Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at [email protected]