Designing my app

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T14:45:14.852Z

If you can design in Figma, you can design in Bubble and vice-versa. I’ve said this many times but Bubble is one of the best wireframers out there.

zach · 2020-08-13T15:00:39.999Z

Ok I’ll stick with bubble

nocodeventure · 2020-08-13T15:03:17.290Z

Importing doesn’t work right atm. You will find your project import in a mess.

rukevweb · 2020-08-13T16:48:44.705Z

What do you mean by “work right”? It seems to work as expected, each page in Figma is converted to a page in Bubble. Or is it with certain elements?

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T16:58:25.984Z

@nocodeventure have you tested it out mate? I haven’t got round to drilling down with it yet??

nocodeventure · 2020-08-13T16:59:56.931Z

Yes, multiple times. It seems that groups and buttons are not imported with proper alignment. It’s useful for copying certain elements though. I use it personally on demo-environment, just to copy stuff I’d rather not re-design/figure out, like certain colors, text elements and perhaps custom shapes.

In certain cases it might save you some useful time.

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T17:05:33.363Z

That’s what I thought… I’m a sucker for pixel perfect spacing and margins so seeing an overlapping element in Bubble makes my eyes bleed!!

nocodeventure · 2020-08-13T17:05:54.363Z

Same here

oleksiy · 2020-08-13T17:44:17.265Z

+1

In general, that helps. If your designers are working in Sigma, this will save a bit of time.

I really hope @Bubble team will continue to work on the integration and this become much more seamless and accurate soon.

duke.severn · 2020-08-13T19:28:21.021Z

A bit of an opinion piece, an a bit of a rant here:

I disagree fully with Bubble integrating (even SEAMLESSLY) with Figma, or Sketch, or XD or anything else. I think that if your designer isn’t working with Bubble, get hifi wireframes and a design kit in any format (hi-rez raster, pdf and svg spring to mind) and build it yourself, or hire a Bubble dev to implement the design.

I have to agree with Keith on this one - if you have a wireframer at the core of your product, why would you spend resources on integrating with another, instead of making yours better. There are countless threads on this very forum with requests on industry-standard things that don’t yet exist or are difficult to properly implement on Bubble. They do exist in Figma for instance, “nested frames”/horizontal scrolling for sections or maybe smart animations which can be done in Bubble, but require time and repetitive banging of heads on desks.

So in my opinion, moving forward, one of three things happens here:

You can integrate with Figma and say “most things will transfer but not all”, which seems to be the status quo, and I wouldn’t use it because why would I spend time building something cool only to see it can’t be properly transferred. Time sink.
You can update the Bubble engine to seamlessly integrate with all of Figma’s features. Cool, but what if I don’t want to use Figma? Are you going to tell me that the native editor has fewer features than the third-party editor? I would feel cheated.
Update the Bubble engine to do everything Figma does first, then work on the ability to transfer. Ok, this seems to be the smartest option, and will ensure everything native is in-line with industry standards or even advanced features. But then why would I need Figma? If I can just do it in Bubble anyway?

From my own perspective, if I spent four years learning how to design with the Bubble editor, and you come out and tell me I should have been learning another industry-standard design app (not even the one with dominant market share anyway???) all along, I will be disappointed in my investment. Please. There are basic features that we need in the editor, and if you’re investing in a better wireframer, make it your own.

ADDENDUM:

What if my designer can’t use Bubble. I know. It sucks. But what if MY designer can’t use Figma?

oleksiy · 2020-08-13T19:49:28.750Z

Yeah, this is a valid point, but it seems like the true responsive design out of the box is not something on bubble radars. New re-design for editor is nice to have, but not essential feature compare to what we are limited when it comes to UI/UX. I guess everybody kind of get used to it, but all this designs workaround takes a lot of time and at some point is not even possible to achieve a required feature. It’s sad, but there is no other no-code alternatives with a powerful workflow capability, like in Bubble. At least, the one I tried didn’t impressed me at all.

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T19:52:00.907Z

If you CAN design then Bubble is god, if you CAN’T design then Bubble is snake oil.

duke.severn · 2020-08-13T20:20:23.456Z

oleksiy:

true responsive design out of the box

I’m wondering what you mean by this? I’ve been making responsive design videos live since last year and though there are a few things that I can’t manage, there usually is an acceptable workaround. Challenge me? Give me a design that you can’t make “truly responsive” and I’ll give it a shot.

casheets123 · 2020-08-13T20:25:00.550Z

Haha that’s a bit hyperbolic mate. Granted I haven’t worked with web design in a very long time. But I have close to two decades in the design/creative industry, and I think it’s fair to say that there are certainly some limitations to bubble compared to other builders that are heavily focused on front end dev.

Most notably, it’s quite difficult to design UX for mobile apps, simple because bubble wasn’t built for this 8 (?) years ago. That’s a donkey’s in tech years.

However, I do agree with snake oil. I think a lot of people think of bubble as wix.com when it’s more like learning a new software and then learn to design on top of that.

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T20:29:39.033Z

Can I play too, love a pixel war

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T20:35:16.434Z

I never said Bubbles’ usp was it’s design capabilities, I merely saying that if you have the design skills and understand WF logic then Bubble is dangerous.

rukevweb · 2020-08-13T20:50:11.146Z

duke.severn:

u mean by this? I’ve been making responsive design videos live since last year and though there are a few things that I can’t manage, there usually is an acceptable workaround. Challenge me? Give me a design that you can’t make “truly responsive” and I’ll give it a shot.

Have to agree with Duke here. If there’s responsive issues you’re having, it’s usually because you haven’t understood the responsive engine well. Duke’s YouTube channel has a lot of videos to help with this.

oleksiy · 2020-08-13T20:58:52.131Z

Well, I’m not saying that bubble is not responsive or something is not possible to accomplish. I meant it takes a lot more time to tweak everything, before you get a decent results. We are all know there is always space for improvement For example there are certain things can’t be changed, due to the core structure, I have recently made a post where I was challenging with a repeating group, which shows an old data for a second or two before the new data was loaded, this is a normal behavior as per Bubble respond. Those things or similar are very annoying and makes unacceptable user experience. That was my biggest challenge so far, I have tried everything, but after a couple of days just made a bug report, where it’s been confirmed. I’m using a workaround to show a loading overlay for 2 seconds, but this just increases a waiting time instead of showing overlay just for an actual loading time.

James, you are out of the game this is the same challenge I had in the post below:

RG shows previous data for a second

In general I really enjoy bubble, but wish I can save some more time with upcoming improvements from bubble. Slowly this is happening, i.e language import/export, finally great improvement which is now a huge time saver and I’m sure there will be more.

nocodeventure · 2020-08-13T21:03:00.974Z

The only thing that holds me back from unleashing a kame-ha-meha on the responsive editor is the horizontal responsiveness. Hopefully, they’ll have something ready for us with the next update. @emmanuel @eve

tenor

nomorecode · 2020-08-13T21:06:19.472Z

boooo, James wants in!!! at least you got a reply back and dropped the -is_loading. The overlay is OK but… what if your RG gets uber duber huuuuuuge and takes 2.0000000009+ secs to load, your left hanging