How Figma Helped Users Embrace a New Identity

A designer at Uber once described himself as "a Sketch user 100 percent."

In 2017, that identity matched the market. UX tools surveys put Sketch at roughly 45% usage. Figma was closer to 7%.

By 2023, the numbers told a different story: Figma sat at around 82.3% in the same survey universe, while Sketch had dropped to the low single digits — around 4.5% in one dataset, closer to ~1.8% in another.

That's a profession changing its default.

And it didn't happen because designers woke up one morning and decided they liked a different toolbar. It happened because a tool stopped being "what I use" and became "how I work with other people."

The identity layer: what "Sketch person" actually meant

Sketch earned loyalty the way the best creative tools do — by feeling like it belonged to the craft.

Designers wrote about it like something they'd bonded with. One retrospective described Sketch as smooth, minimal, made for designers like me — and the author still called it one of the best interfaces they'd ever used, even after switching.

In Sketch forums, the identity line was drawn in plain language:

• "I enjoy Sketch's interface waaay more… the nice UI makes me more creative."
• "Figma was designed to appease engineers and product managers. Sketch is focused on one thing: being a great drawing tool."

That's someone protecting a role. Sketch reinforced that role deliberately. Its positioning celebrated being a truly native Mac app — performance, familiarity, personalization, the feeling of home on your machine. Mac-focused coverage echoed the same story: Sketch lived on the Mac, integrated deeply, felt instantly familiar.

So "I'm a Sketch person" bundled a whole set of beliefs: craft-first work matters. Focus matters. Speed comes from native responsiveness and muscle memory. The design environment should feel like a studio, not a meeting room. The artifact is mine until it's ready.

That identity isn't irrational. It's built from real investment.

Years of shortcuts. Symbols. Libraries. Systems. Taste. Confidence.

When a tool sits that deep in your routine, switching is never just "learning something new." It feels like moving your hands to a different keyboard and hoping you can still play.

Why identity-rooted loyalty resists switching — even when the alternative is objectively better

There's a reason many designers could look at Figma, nod, and still refuse to move.

One of the best-documented migration narratives illustrates exactly why. Campaign Monitor designer Buzz Usborne's account of moving Help Scout's design system from Sketch to Figma starts from a surprising position: he already thought Figma was the better tool, the stronger company, the safer long-term bet.

He still didn't want to switch — because he expected the process to be too difficult and costly.

But when identity is tied to a tool, the "cost" isn't just migration effort. It's loss. Loss of speed you earned through repetition. Loss of a UI that feels like home. Loss of a workflow that matches your values. Loss of an environment where you know you're good.

Behavioral research on brand identity explains why this feels different from normal preference. When the features people see as central to a brand change, loyalty doesn't degrade politely. People experience a break in recognizability. The old thing no longer maps to the self-story that formed around it.

In Sketch's case, "native Mac craft" wasn't peripheral. It sat at the center of how many designers explained their own competence: native feel → control → speed → quality → confidence.

Now layer in a second psychological force: the endowment effect.

If you've spent years building a design system, templates, libraries, and habits inside Sketch, the tool starts to feel like an asset you own. Leaving stops feeling like "I'll try something else" and starts feeling like abandoning something you built.

That's why early reactions to Figma could sound extreme. One early response to the cloud-collaboration future was: "If this is the future of design, I'm changing careers."

That's a professional identity bracing for displacement.

The resistance arc: what people actually did when the team moved

The most revealing part of the Sketch → Figma story is that resistance didn't always look like refusal.

Often it looked like reluctant compliance followed by an oddly fast reorientation.

Reddit threads capture it cleanly:

• "I was pretty resistant to switching to Figma but got used to it quickly."
• "Sketch feels like a better design tool while Figma feels like a component assembler."

That second line matters. It shows what people felt they were losing: the sensation of drawing, crafting, shaping — replaced by assembling a system.

Even after switching, many designers kept a portion of their Sketch identity alive through critique: Figma isn't perfect, it gets put on a pedestal, Sketch still feels better in certain ways. UX Collective's "Goodbye Sketch… It's Been Emotional" captured the mood well. This was a breakup with a tool people loved.

So what broke the deadlock?

Not a single feature. A sequence of adoption moves that reduced the sense of loss and increased the sense of inevitability.

Figma's identity disruption playbook

1. Make it safe to try without declaring allegiance

The first move was lowering the stakes.

Figma created a path where designers could use it for side projects — free, low pressure, not tied to their day-job reputation. Side projects are where curiosity is allowed and where "I'm a Sketch person" can soften into "I'm just seeing what this feels like."

That matters because identity doesn't change under threat. It changes under exposure.

A couple of days is often enough to learn whether the feared loss is real. Designer Buzz Usborne describes exactly that: after spending a few extra days inside Figma, he saw how much more productive and collaborative his team would be. He converted quickly — because he finally had lived experience, not theory.

2. Turn the file into a room other people can enter

Figma's cloud-first architecture did something Sketch couldn't easily match: it made the design artifact a shared space by default.

Then Figma amplified that with product-led growth mechanics that invited non-designers in. PMs reviewing flows in context. Engineers checking details directly. Marketers commenting without screenshots. Stakeholders pointing at the real thing, not an export.

Once those people are in the file, the decision dynamics change. A designer is no longer choosing a private tool for private craft. They're choosing the place the team coordinates.

That's a significant identity shift — from "designer as owner of the artifact" to "designer as host of the shared workspace."

3. Let designers persuade designers

Identity shifts travel through peers.

Figma leaned on community-led credibility — designer advocates, not top-down sales pitches. A deeply loyal Sketch user doesn't switch because of a spec sheet. He switches because of relationships, repeated exposure, and seeing the workflow wins in practice. Then he carries that preference to the next company.

That's how identity barriers crumble — through trusted social proof.

4. Change what the profession thinks it's optimizing for

The deepest move wasn't "we're a better drawing tool."

It was making collaboration central to the definition of modern design work.

When the professional narrative shifts from "I craft screens" to "I align teams," the identity badge changes too. The respected designer is no longer the person with the cleanest file — it's the person who reduces confusion, speeds decisions, and makes the work legible to everyone.

At that point, tool identity gives way to practice identity.

You're not a Sketch person or a Figma person. You're the kind of designer who makes collaboration work.

The tipping point: remote work made collaboration non-negotiable

Every identity shift needs a forcing function. For design tools, COVID and the move to remote work changed the baseline. Collaboration wasn't a bonus anymore. It became the operating condition.

Async feedback, distributed teams, cross-functional work happening in parallel — suddenly the coordination cost of exports, handoffs, and "who has the latest file" became painfully visible.

Sketch's Mac-native, offline-first positioning still delivered craft and responsiveness. But the bottleneck had moved. It wasn't drawing anymore. It was coordination.

And when the bottleneck changes, the profession stops rewarding the old optimization.

That's when the switch accelerated. Because craft now had to include collaboration.

The collapse in numbers: once the default flips, identities reorganize

The UX tools surveys describe a new default:

• Figma rising from ~7% to ~82.3% in a few years
• Sketch falling from ~45% to the low single digits

Once a tool becomes the default, it shapes everything around it: what juniors learn first, what teams expect in hiring, what templates and tutorials assume, what "normal" looks like across the industry.

At that point, Sketch loyalty requires more explanation. More translation. More workarounds.

Some designers will still choose it for the craft experience. But the profession no longer scaffolds that identity the way it used to.

The lesson for product builders: "I'm a [Product] person" is a warning label

When users describe themselves as "people of the product," you're competing with skill investment, daily muscle memory, pride and competence, the comfort of a familiar environment, and belonging to a professional tribe.

Figma's win offers a practical playbook for markets with identity-heavy incumbents:

Lower the stakes of trying. Give people a safe place to experiment where reputations aren't on the line.

Expand who participates. When the workflow becomes shared, the tool choice stops being private.

Build credibility through peers. Identity shifts spread through trusted humans, not feature comparisons.

Move the identity up a level. Away from "I use this tool" and toward "this is how I practice the craft."

The hardest switches are fought in the part of someone's day where they're most competent — and most afraid of losing that competence.