The long, boring intro is just to try to avoid people coming in the comments with their fist up:

“You young generations don’t get it!”

First of all, I know, I look amazing for my age, but I’m not young, unfortunately. Secondly, yea, I totally get it, as I said.

Let’s get to the point: what sparked this rant? The reaction on social media (mostly LinkedIn. Not sure about X ’cause I’m not around there much) from “UX professionals” to this:

“With all those terrible UX choices Figma made, they spend time on silly things like this!1!!11 AAAARRGHHH”

“These cursors are TERRIBLE for accessibility!!1! #a11y”

“We got custom cursors on Figma before GTA6!”

(ok the last one makes sense)

People please! Put down the pitchforks for a moment, and let’s talk.

1. These can be easily turned OFF

2. These will last for one week (by the time you read this, they might be gone already), as explained here. And if they decide to keep it, fine. See point 1.

3. How much of an investment do you think this was? This is 1 designer + 1 developer 2-day job. I don’t think they took entire teams out of a major feature to make this happen. Put down your calculator, it’s ok.

And 4, more companies should do this.

Most importantly, more companies should do things such as April Fun Day. Once a year, or even quarter, spend a day to do a hackaton to let all the silly and not-so-silly ideas that the team keeps in the drawer out.

You don’t even know how many features we love in products we use daily came out of events like that. Spoiler alert: A LOT! Sometimes even entirely different product ideas were born like this.

Everyone in a product team, being them designers, PMs or engineers, has a list of ideas they would like to make happen. Sometimes they are as silly as a custom cursor shaped like a pixelated bunny, sometimes they are Facebook’s chat feature. And this is O-K.