FigmaTrace

FigmaTrace: Capturing Creative Nuances in Human Figma Design Workflows

Human design workflows in Figma, captured as training data for creative design tasks.

Darshan Deshpande, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Martyna Markiewicz, Devanshu Bansal, Shivani Jain, Nicholas Saban, Chirag Maheshwari, Anand Kannappan

Darshan Deshpande, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Martyna Markiewicz, Devanshu Bansal, Shivani Jain, Nicholas Saban, Chirag Maheshwari, Anand Kannappan

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01

In brief

02

Key figure

Six out-of-domain GUI agent benchmarks, for the base 27B model, the same model fine-tuned on FigmaTrace, and two closed models. Fine-tuning raises the base model on five of six benchmarks and puts it ahead of both closed models on GUI-Odyssey and AndroidControl.
Six out-of-domain GUI agent benchmarks, for the base 27B model, the same model fine-tuned on FigmaTrace, and two closed models. Fine-tuning raises the base model on five of six benchmarks and puts it ahead of both closed models on GUI-Odyssey and AndroidControl.
03

Runs

03

Abstract

Vision Language Models have recently shown improvements in several objective and verifiable domains such as object detection but continue to underperform on subjective and creative design tasks. A major contributor to this performance gap is the lack of high quality human workflow data that captures a diverse set of preferences and decisions that make human experts good at design tasks. In this work, we first define a unique, expert curated taxonomy of design skills and best practices which we further expand into a set of 126 open ended, subjective, long horizon tasks. Built on top of this and expert solutions, our dataset FigmaTrace contains over 200 hours of human captured video data converted into 3469 design trajectories using a novel design phase-based method. We use our dataset to train four models and show that training on FigmaTrace leads to a performance improvement comparable to frontier closed models such as Claude-Opus-5 and GPT-5.6-Sol on four out of distribution agentic GUI environments. We further perform a useful ablation to attribute these performance improvements to a design phase-based video to trajectory conversion which outperforms prior length-based conversion approaches. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis on the best performing Qwen3.8-27B outputs to better correlate performance improvements to F IGMATRACE ’s trends. We open source our dataset and the best Qwen3.8-27B model for the community.

Cite this
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Darshan Deshpande, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Martyna Markiewicz, Devanshu Bansal, Shivani Jain, Nicholas Saban, Chirag Maheshwari, Anand Kannappan. FigmaTrace: Capturing Creative Nuances in Human Figma Design Workflows. arXiv:2608.21460, 2026.
@article{deshpande2026figmatrace, title={FigmaTrace: Capturing Creative Nuances in Human Figma Design Workflows}, author={Darshan Deshpande and Yoshinari Fujinuma and Martyna Markiewicz and Devanshu Bansal and Shivani Jain and Nicholas Saban and Chirag Maheshwari and Anand Kannappan}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.21460}, year={2026} }
arXiv 2608.21460
August 20, 2026
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