Story about my plugin which helped my design team save hours of mundane work and is also helping 20,000+ people.

👋 What’s this?

An auto page numbering plugin for Figma. The plugin adds page number text to the frames automatically based on their position on the canvas.

I designed and coded it myself.

🌱 The Inception

We as a design team, at our company, have to prepare and update the product manual in sync with the release cycle. As some new features get added in certain areas of the product every month, even one page being added in the middle meant an exhausting task of re-numbering all the pages after that.

graphic showing frustration after one page getting added in the middle

You could imagine the apprehension we had, when the release cycle of our product approached. We were dreaded when someone uttered the words “Product Manual”.

We always used to search for some tool that could make our lives easier, but the search always ended up in vain. We sat down and manually entered those numbers a few time. But this particular time I couldn’t prepare myself mentally to do this task. That’s what led to inception for this idea.

📈 Complementing Natural User Behavior

For sake of organizing and designing our manual easily, we always visually group the frames according to the sections in our product. This made me think and identify the patterns in grouping.

• Grouping of the frames according to their sections was done naturally by us, without much thought
• Each feature would sometimes have several pages and it would have all its pages arranged vertically and next feature the same way besides it

our arrangement of sections

This arrangement is powerful, as it is very natural for humans to arrange and access the data in this manner . The examples of such arrangements can found in newspaper, comics, etc.

I have seen tons of designers organizing their frames in this manner.

This pivoted me into a direction to start the plugin. Many of the other plugins which export Figma frames into a single PDF required users to arrange them all in one single column and then run the plugin.