Designer developer synergy

I experienced some friction today while working on a fairly new project. I’d completed the ideation phase, defined personas, ran through user stories, drew out a system design, and was ready to start on more user facing parts. Since this project involves a few multidisciplinary team members, I knew sharing mockups would be the best way to get feedback. Figma was the tool of choice for this project and I’ve used it in the past so I navigate around it fairly well, but after a few hours creating a component and screen or two, I had to switch gears.

It was gnawing at me that I was spending so much time in Figma when coding a prototype would take a fraction of the time.

There must be a better way for developers to write code that designers can continue to work with. After all, designers collaborate in real time together in Figma and developers collaborate in real time together in a code editor. Why can’t we have a tool that combines the two?

Something that combined Storybook, Figma, and a code editor could be the answer.