Case study · Design
Forty artboards and a stylus.
A product designer lives on the mouse. Four Figma windows share one icon, the references are in Arc, and the review is on a TV he cannot reach the green button on.
The desk
Tomás designs a consumer banking app. On a normal afternoon: Figma open in four windows: the design system, the current flow, a copy of last quarter's flow for reference, and a scratch file, plus Arc with a tab per competitor screen, Linear for the ticket, Slack, and Notes. His right hand is on a mouse or a stylus for eight hours. His left hand touches the keyboard for Cmd-Z and letters.
The problem
Four Figma windows are, to macOS, one Figma. Cmd-Tab shows one icon; Cmd-` cycles them blind, and one of them is fullscreen on the second display so it does not cycle at all. He had been using Mission Control and reading window titles at stamp size, or clicking the Dock icon and waiting for the window menu. Every trip meant putting down the stylus.
What changed
The spiral opens from the thumb button under the hand that is already holding the mouse. Four Figma cards, same icon, each tinted the same, but the hub names the one under the pointer, and a nudge of the wheel walks through "Design System," "Onboarding v3," "Onboarding v2 (ref)." Most of the time he does not read. The previous window is preselected, and the loop he lives in is flow, design system, flow. Each way is a hold-and-release.
For the competitor tabs he types the bank's name. Arc's tabs are indexed by host and title, so monzo is one card whatever the page is called. Linear is pinned, as is the design-system file itself, so it is reachable even when he has closed it.
Thursday review: the current flow needs to be on the meeting-room TV, which is a second display he cannot see the menu bar of from where he sits. He opens the spiral, right-clicks the card, Move to Display. VortexFlow leaves the fullscreen Space first, then places the window. No green button, no dragging a window across a gap.
The setup
- Trigger
- Rear thumb button on an MX Master; Back was never used anyway. The stylus barrel button stays as right-click.
- Layout
- Circular. He prefers a ring, and he never wanted Screen Recording granted for previews of client work.
- Pins
- Design System (Figma link) · Sprint board (Linear link) · a pinned ⌘\ shortcut that toggles Figma's UI
- Always first
- Figma is set to show first; its windows keep their own recency order behind that.
What it did not fix
Figma is still one icon to macOS, and the four windows still look alike as thumbnails anywhere else. What changed is that the switcher names them and puts them under a hand that never had to let go.
A composite: the desk, the windows and the setup are drawn from how people actually use VortexFlow, but the person is a stand-in and nothing here is a testimonial. If this is your desk, tell us what we got wrong.