11. Prototyping - Figma 101

In Figma, creating interactive prototypes is actually pretty simple. (lively music) The process starts by adding interactions between different frames and your design. Let's take a look at how this works. Let's first go to the prototype tab in the properties panel. Now, you can start by selecting an object in your design that you'd like to be interactive.

This could be a button, an image, or any other element, including the frame itself. Once selected, there is a plus icon to the right of your selection. You can now drag it to another frame to indicate where this interaction should take you. Once you connect the interaction noodle to a new frame, you'll see the interaction details window. You can choose the type of interaction you'd like to add, such as on click, on hover, or on drag.

After choosing your interaction type, you can see the action to take place has already been specified, like navigating to this different frame. To test your prototype, you can hit the play button in the top right of the toolbar. By adding interactions, you can effectively demonstrate the flow of your design to any stakeholders, or you can test its usability with real users. In addition to a single interaction, you can also have interactive components. To do this we'll have a few different steps.

Number one, create a new component with multiple navigation options. Number two, link each navigation item to the appropriate frame. Now place an instance of your component on all of those frames. When you go into prototype mode, you can see that all of the interactions are set up for you for every frame based on that interactive component. Once you've got a handle on adding basic interactions to your designs, you can start to explore some more advanced features.

One of these is Smart Animate, which will animate the differences between the same object on two different frames. This works by comparing the differences and generating a smooth animation to transition between them. To use Amart Animate, you'll need two frames with at least one common object with the same layer name. You can adjust the properties of this object in the second frame. Maybe you move its position, change its size, or change its color.

And now when you link these two frames in the prototype tab and you select Smart Animate as the action, Figma will automatically animate the change. You can use this for small interactions, or you can go all out and create something super dynamic. Overlays in Figma offer another way to enhance your prototypes. They allow you to display additional content without navigating away from the current screen. To do this, we'll create the overlay content in a new frame.

Then we'll select the object in our main design that will trigger the overlay. Now we'll go to the prototype tab in the right side properties panel, and we'll click the plus button to add an interaction. We'll choose open overlay as the action. Then we'll select the frame that we created for the overlay. (lively music) (mouse clicking) Figma can also serve as a powerful tool for creating presentations.

I find it much easier and faster to create slide decks in Figma rather than Keynote or PowerPoint or Google Slides. To do this, we'll treat each frame as an individual slide in our presentation. The slides can include whatever we want, text, images, shapes, et cetera, and we can use components for repeated elements like headers and footers to maintain consistency. And to navigate during a presentation, you can go into prototype mode without adding any interactions beforehand, and use your keyboard's arrow keys to move from one frame to the next in the order they appear on your canvas. The frame-to-frame navigation in a prototype relies on layer order.

So a pro tip for organizing your slides is to create horizontal sections with a number and title. If your frames get unorganized, you can select an entire section, temporarily put it in auto layout. This will organize your frames back into the proper layer order. We can hit Command + R to rename all slides at once. This will bring up the batch renaming modal.

Then we can rename the entire section by starting with name. Then we can add a descending number variable and hit rename. Now when we go into prototype mode, there'll be an order. I know this might sound a little bit complicated, but it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. So now you know a few fundamental examples of how you can use prototyping in Figma.

Depending on your needs, you can keep your prototypes simple or you can dive deeper to craft larger interactive examples.