UX Questions

How should I name my design files? UX Question #43

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John from Media, Pennsylvania, says:

“I see Figma frames named Final but we’re still making changes. Shouldn’t final mean final?”

The question here, I think is, How should I name my design files?

I love that question. Thanks for asking, John. This is UX Question number 43 and I am Ben Judy.

How should I name my design files? Well, who among us hasn’t named a file something like, ‘Landing revision 6 FINAL v4.’

Users aren’t going to see that file name, so it has no impact on the user experience. This is an issue of good semantics for collaboration. It’s important to label your design artifacts in a way that makes sense to your coworkers. Especially when making many revisions.

Software developers figured this out a long time ago. For example, if you go to semver.org, you’ll see a specification for semantic versioning. Any team can decide to adopt this as a team norm for numbering incremental software releases, and—problem solved.

I’m unaware of any equivalent specification for design assets. I don’t think there’s a customerjourneyver.org or a FigmaLayerName.org.

I’ll just tell you what makes sense to me, as I’ve tried just about everything since naming my first Photoshop files back in the mid-1990’s.

The file naming scheme that makes the most sense to me is to use the project name and then add a date-time stamp. So let’s say your project is named Product Details.

So you would name your file something like Product Details 2023_05_29—to indicate the date that file was created, May 29, 2023. Now, every time you make a new version of this file, you change the date.

If you’re making multiple revisions daily, just add a timestamp. So, Product Details 2023_05_29-1330 for 1:30 p.m.

Should you use spaces or underscores or hyphens? I don’t care. But you might want to establish a team agreement on those details.

It’s not an elegant way to name files, but it is machine readable and sortable. And, if you can’t find a file with a more recent date-time stamp in the file name, then you can assume this is the most recent version of the design.

That’s a whole lot better than Final v4 which ignores the reality that you usually can’t predict when your design work will be finished. Let’s stop staying Final in our filenames. There’s no good reason for it.

I’d love to hear how you name your design files, and you can tell me why my way is crazy. Sound off in the comments on YouTube, or find UX Questions on Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram, and share your thoughts.

Keep asking your questions about UX. Next time, I’ll answer the question: What’s the difference between Product design and UX design?

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