Improve Designer, Export Persona: "User Variables"

[flobnoit]

Greetings Affinity team,

My Improvement ask for Designer (and possibly the other programs as well? I have the Universal license, but almost exclusively work with Designer) would be as follows:

Context: Designer (all builds) Export Persona

In the Slice export naming box, there is a box for setting "User Variables".
 

At present, creating a user variable and setting the value does not seem to do anything. The variable does not appear to be available to any other Slice path, meaning having a value in it is more cumbersome than simply filling out the Path Components field by hand. I searched the documentation and asked about this behaviour here, but it appears that it's a long-standing incomplete feature.

 

Request: to make User Variables behave conceptually more like a variable in programming (or akin to the Symbols behavior), where once created it can be applied as a Patch Component in as many slice outputs as desired, and then updating the Value of the variable will update all future exports that draw on it. 

My "that'd be cool!"-level request would additionally include adding a Studio block for the Export Persona to allow viewing and updating of User Variables. 

Benefit: improving export workflows for people who are exporting several variations of the same slice, eg. when making product mockups with multiple colour variations for the outputs.

 

Thanks,
flobnoit