Robin-Yann Storm hosted the Tool Design & USD Roundtables at GDC 2024 to discuss topics around designing tools and user experiences. In his recap, he shares insights and trends from the discussions, highlighting Figma's dominance in UI/UX design tools, the importance of user research and empathy, challenges around design systems and getting user adoption of new tools, and more.

Key points:

• Figma has become the dominant UI/UX design tool, used by around 95% of attendees

• User research through direct observation is crucial for understanding needs and pain points

• Having a consistent design system can greatly improve developer experience but is difficult to start and maintain

• Getting users to adopt new tools requires making them clearly better than existing options

• Creating a culture of design means deeply involving teams in observing and empathizing with users