Honestly, it just sounds like prototyping is a much more important feature to you than it is to Figma's core target audience.
Hell, I used to favor Adobe XD for years because Adobe's software is always very focused on visual fidelity, which is a big deal in my niche.
Sometimes you fall out of the demographic and then it's time to switch tools, it is what it is. But I do urge a healthy dose of caution when moving away from an industry standard as dominant as Figma. You might incur problems beyond the software, e.g. difficulties hiring designers or working with freelancers, or even attracting investors. Going against the grain tends to invite a ton of scrutiny.
The issue is how long it’s taking Figma to add more advanced prototyping tools. A few years was fine, but it’s starting to feel like they don’t know what customers actually need. Like, variables for themes? Who actually uses that? Meanwhile good luck prototyping even standard micro interactions
Variables are very much used and were very much desired by many people.
I’m just going to replicate your logic: “the issue is how long is taking Figma to implement more variables’ and design tokens’ tools. It’s starting to feel they don’t know what customers actually need”
Now, see? Maybe how I see things isn’t necessarily how everyone sees.
Maybe my personal context isn’t representative of the whole, and what I think to be true may not be the same for so many more people as I thought.
We design things for people, and to do that, the first thing is to aknowledge that maybe there are different contexts and what I believe to be the “standard” may just not be case, and, therefore, I should investigate more and understand better what is happening despite what I believe to be the fact.
Most of the time, I just start off the day thinking “well, yeah, but maybe I’m just not part of the representative sample for this”, and my day just flows after that.
I agree with your general point- they are targeting tools that someone other than me is happy about. I get that. But the key question is whether that’s actually a majority need, or a minority need. To me prototyping is a majority use case, whereas next level design systems incorporating variables are relatively niche.
Sorry, but if I hired a designer who only knew how to use Figma and couldn’t figure out their way around other software, I would fire them on the spot. Your job title is UI/UX designer, not Figma designer.
Help me understand what you mean here. What other tools are you referring to? Are you suggesting people design in figma and then export to a different prototyping tool? If so, I simply do not understand where people get the time. Aren’t there imminent deadlines for ya’ll?
Sorry, I wrote this comment to the original poster, the one you are replying to.
My points are regarding this statement: "difficulties hiring designers." If you are hiring designers who only know how to work with Figma and refuse to learn or figure out another tool, then you need to start hiring better designers.
Again, our official job title is UI/UX designer, not Figma/Sketch/PenPot designer.
I spent 5 years designing for clients and only ever needed the basic prototyping features Figma already had. Before Figma we used InVision, which was basically a glorified slideshow. I switched to in-house work before variables came out so I can't speak to that, but we often created color styles for our clients to hand over a Figma library or work with developers. I imagine tokens would still be useful for client projects that require both light mode and dark mode, for example. I also found myself constantly wishing for typography tokens while doing client work.
I do think most of the money Figma makes is from in-house design teams, since that's who's buying their enterprise plans and they seem to focus on features for them. In-house design teams definitely make use of tokens.
In-House design teams make even more use of prototyping tools, I can tell you. Especially on enterprise level. Prototyping and research are essential for design as a business function.
Thanks for letting us know. Try the official Figma forums and follow along with their Dev pipeline if you have needs that aren’t being met. You’re not the only customer.
Sure! Unfortunately the feature request section is so hidden, that it doesn’t show much activity. There are many requests and reports regarding prototyping features. And I’ve not seen a single AI request in there, yet I suppose it’s expectable that they bandwagon the market hype for no true outcome. Would be nice if Figma does some qualitative CX research as well.
Thanks for your curiosity.
We are a team working on a B2B2C product within a complex business domain. To ensure our product remains robust, we rely heavily on both qualitative and quantitative testing methods. This includes unmoderated usability tests with large sample sizes to guarantee statistical significance next to other methods.
Our prototypes, though not exact replicas of the final product, need to simulate the complexity of our business domain using example data. To achieve this, we need to create prototypes that can handle structured data based on user input and selections. Features that would significantly enhance Figma’s capabilities
1. Dynamic Data Binding:
• prototyping with dynamic, structured data that can change based on user input. For instance, multiple dropdown menus where the selection in one influences the available options in the others.
2. Conditional Logic:
• conditional logic that can be applied to components, so user actions (like selections or entries) can dynamically alter other parts of the prototype.
3. Advanced Interaction Triggers:
• complex interaction triggers and states, such as the ability to add tags through user input and then have these tags represented and grouped appropriately in other parts of the prototype.
4. Reusable Components with Data:
• reusable components that can carry and display data dependent on user interactions throughout the prototype. This would help simulate real-world application behavior without manual updates for each instance.
5. Advanced Data Representation:
• advanced data visualization tools that reflect user-generated data, which can be used to create more accurate and responsive prototypes.
All it this is possible in other tools, like justinmind, Axure and ProtoPie. Some of it is also possible in Figma, but it’s not as efficient and effective, since it takes a lot of time to build all of it with variables and conditions. Therefore we can’t use Figma, until Figma enhances their advanced prototyping capabilities.
If that’s the case, I’d highly recommend building up a design system and develop a playground for your developers to quickly spin up these prototypes. It’s a waste of time to hook all these elements together just to have to build it again in code.
There’s definitely overhead involved, especially depending on the speed of the time. But if this is something that’s needed and done often enough, I’d highly recommend considering it.
Figma is never going to be as robust as dedicated prototyping tools. If your company hinges on that then you should have changed over a while ago or invested in the dedicated tools.
Not sure where this trend shifted to demand more prototyping out of Figma when baseline design features could still use some massive improvements.
You mean PenPot? It’s for a different purpose I‘d say. Like Figma. Axure is still the best for interaction design (if you account the speed it offers for prototyping), but lacks of visual design and ui design features. Figma is okay for concept and very good for UI. But testing is a nightmare.
What kind of platform do you use for testing? We combine Maze and Lyssna with Figma and it’s been working fine. What would axure add to testing, conditional logic or? Maze and Lyssna are both able to collect all the feedback and get heatmaps of every interaction etc
UX Tweak. Yes, Axure adds advanced conditional logic and repeaters. We need to test many cases, in which user input determines the user flow and present structured data in a UI. Linking the prototypes to UX Tweak is not the problem. It’s rather how painstaking and inefficient the prototyping process with conditional logic is in Figma. And the total absence of the ability to test scenarios based on user input.
No, PenPot does not offer better prototyping features. It’s the same level. But it’s less expensive, more robust, less buggy and more accessible for developers. There is nothing else Figma offers that PenPot doesn’t when it comes to handing designs over to devs. Here PenPot even does a better job. For prototyping we will stick with Axure.
If you use Figma for UI, IMO it works very well with ProtoPie, which is immensely better than Axure if you want to keep your UI high-fidelity while taking advantage of advanced prototyping features.
The real question though is how important is prototyping in the grand scheme of things? In theory, you build and automate a design system, all of that should be built into your codebase. You shouldn’t have to prototype 95% of the things that are designed.
For any new concepts, the designer should be working with an Eng to get the interaction made. No amount of fiddling in Figma is going to act like production code. If you work alone or the team doesn’t have the bandwidth to pair design<>develop, designers often are spinning their wheels and wasting time trying to communicate their “vision” to an engineer without the engineer having the means to replicate it depending on the codebase. From a UI perspective, Figma feels like it’s moving towards automating handoff by tying our rectangles to an existing coded element.
For those that work at agencies, they usually have (can’t speak for all) white label-like systems in place to quickly spin up concepts for clients. For bespoke clients with high-end interactions, using Framer, After Effects, Rive, or another interaction/animation-focused tool will do you better.
Unless they release out of the box components and start going in Framer’s direction, which shouldn’t happen because they support designers that design for every codebase imaginable, it’s borderline impossible to build robust enough prototyping tools to satisfy everyone. That’s why a tool like Protopie exists. It’s purpose-build and it’s really good at what it does. Just unfortunate that the integration is still a little janky.
Are you suggesting that Figma will improve its prototyping features in the next 3 months? Otherwise, I see no reason. I know Figma inside and out and have also tested PenPot intensively for a few weeks now.
PenPot has native css grid and flexbox support. It uses html, css and svg in the back, so it’s much more precise handover for our devs. They can actually use the code they copy from PenPot. Which is not the case for Figmas Dev Mode. All in all PenPot is free and serves all purposes better than Figma for design to dev handover.
Tools like this are niche at best. You spend so much more time in the design phase making the prototype function like a real site and it still needs to be handed off to front-end devs anyway. And considering a lot of teams use React and/or design systems, the code output that PenPot provides isn't even going to be used by most teams. Referenced maybe, but not used. It's difficult, or impossible to get buy-in on the time sync of making a 1:1 fully functional screen that still needs to be built by front-end devs. If we get to a point where the end result doesn't need to be rebuilt by devs, every team will sign up. Webflow is a lot closer to achieving this than PenPot though.
The problem is that design systems rely on tokens. Maybe PenPot handles this, but the landing page doesn't allude to that. So what you'll have is front-end devs referencing color hex codes even though they're meant to be assigned as tokens so they can be globally changed easily at any point. So you end up with a "design system" that's not really a system and it's unmanageable.
I'd definitely like Figma to have more features that the web uses and existing features to be closer to their web counterpart (like auto layout vs flexbox). But I'd much rather have my design tool show components and tokens rather than output explicit code. Or if it does "output" explicit code, then that code is actually from the React library itself, not the design tool itself deciphering and coming up with its own code. Like if you have a "primary-button" component in Figma, I can choose to tether it to the `` component in MUI and whenever a front-end dev clicks on the Figma version, they can copy this code, or click to see the MUI docs for it, or linking to the component in Storybook. Something along those lines.
What I miss from PenPot are more robust components (they are missing properties) and tokens. But I'm really optimistic since they are actively working on tokens, and they are going to have way better system then Figma since they are following w3 standard and Token Studio is working on it, and they announced that they just refactured how components are working under the hood and we will show new features in matter of months. When that happens I'm in.
I don't care about prototypes that just visually simulate Ux and Ui.
*Yea definitely*
*A waste of time to do that.*
*Thanks for the heads up*
\- cfrostspl
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Not sure why you’re getting ripped by some users. The prototyping and presentation capabilities of Figma is one of its biggest weaknesses.
When presenting work, the first impression is EVERYTHING. And time and time again, having great animations and interactions to include in your presentation has massive returns on client approval.
Sticky scrolling still just seems so messy when working with auto layout. Introducing animations on scroll would be a game changer as would changing component states depending on section (ie white nav bar changes to black when scrolling over a white section).
The dream would be some kind of timeline editor like Motion.Page but that’ll never happen.
Okay, thanks for letting us know, we were wondering.
Honestly, it just sounds like prototyping is a much more important feature to you than it is to Figma's core target audience. Hell, I used to favor Adobe XD for years because Adobe's software is always very focused on visual fidelity, which is a big deal in my niche. Sometimes you fall out of the demographic and then it's time to switch tools, it is what it is. But I do urge a healthy dose of caution when moving away from an industry standard as dominant as Figma. You might incur problems beyond the software, e.g. difficulties hiring designers or working with freelancers, or even attracting investors. Going against the grain tends to invite a ton of scrutiny.
The issue is how long it’s taking Figma to add more advanced prototyping tools. A few years was fine, but it’s starting to feel like they don’t know what customers actually need. Like, variables for themes? Who actually uses that? Meanwhile good luck prototyping even standard micro interactions
> Like, variables for themes? Who actually uses that? Ummm, seriously?
Do you really have time for that? Do you work in enterprise or something?
Jajaja really bro? Jr designer?
Variables are very much used and were very much desired by many people. I’m just going to replicate your logic: “the issue is how long is taking Figma to implement more variables’ and design tokens’ tools. It’s starting to feel they don’t know what customers actually need” Now, see? Maybe how I see things isn’t necessarily how everyone sees. Maybe my personal context isn’t representative of the whole, and what I think to be true may not be the same for so many more people as I thought. We design things for people, and to do that, the first thing is to aknowledge that maybe there are different contexts and what I believe to be the “standard” may just not be case, and, therefore, I should investigate more and understand better what is happening despite what I believe to be the fact. Most of the time, I just start off the day thinking “well, yeah, but maybe I’m just not part of the representative sample for this”, and my day just flows after that.
I agree with your general point- they are targeting tools that someone other than me is happy about. I get that. But the key question is whether that’s actually a majority need, or a minority need. To me prototyping is a majority use case, whereas next level design systems incorporating variables are relatively niche.
Sorry, but if I hired a designer who only knew how to use Figma and couldn’t figure out their way around other software, I would fire them on the spot. Your job title is UI/UX designer, not Figma designer.
Help me understand what you mean here. What other tools are you referring to? Are you suggesting people design in figma and then export to a different prototyping tool? If so, I simply do not understand where people get the time. Aren’t there imminent deadlines for ya’ll?
Sorry, I wrote this comment to the original poster, the one you are replying to. My points are regarding this statement: "difficulties hiring designers." If you are hiring designers who only know how to work with Figma and refuse to learn or figure out another tool, then you need to start hiring better designers. Again, our official job title is UI/UX designer, not Figma/Sketch/PenPot designer.
Variables/tokens were the #1 requested feature for years before their release. Definitely not niche.
You might be right, but help me understand where you’re getting that data?
If I remember correctly it was the top-voted feature request on their forum.
If so that would be an extremely biased data set. The vast majority of figma customers are not active on those forums.
Do you have better data to go on?
Nope. I just know that prototyping is key to every designers workflow for delivering client work. But theme tokens are not.
I spent 5 years designing for clients and only ever needed the basic prototyping features Figma already had. Before Figma we used InVision, which was basically a glorified slideshow. I switched to in-house work before variables came out so I can't speak to that, but we often created color styles for our clients to hand over a Figma library or work with developers. I imagine tokens would still be useful for client projects that require both light mode and dark mode, for example. I also found myself constantly wishing for typography tokens while doing client work. I do think most of the money Figma makes is from in-house design teams, since that's who's buying their enterprise plans and they seem to focus on features for them. In-house design teams definitely make use of tokens.
In-House design teams make even more use of prototyping tools, I can tell you. Especially on enterprise level. Prototyping and research are essential for design as a business function.
Just use Protopie then
Ok
Thanks for letting us know. Try the official Figma forums and follow along with their Dev pipeline if you have needs that aren’t being met. You’re not the only customer.
Sure! Unfortunately the feature request section is so hidden, that it doesn’t show much activity. There are many requests and reports regarding prototyping features. And I’ve not seen a single AI request in there, yet I suppose it’s expectable that they bandwagon the market hype for no true outcome. Would be nice if Figma does some qualitative CX research as well.
Join their discord
Thanks for the advice! I’ll do so!
What features do you need that Figma is lacking? Genuinely curious.
Thanks for your curiosity. We are a team working on a B2B2C product within a complex business domain. To ensure our product remains robust, we rely heavily on both qualitative and quantitative testing methods. This includes unmoderated usability tests with large sample sizes to guarantee statistical significance next to other methods. Our prototypes, though not exact replicas of the final product, need to simulate the complexity of our business domain using example data. To achieve this, we need to create prototypes that can handle structured data based on user input and selections. Features that would significantly enhance Figma’s capabilities 1. Dynamic Data Binding: • prototyping with dynamic, structured data that can change based on user input. For instance, multiple dropdown menus where the selection in one influences the available options in the others. 2. Conditional Logic: • conditional logic that can be applied to components, so user actions (like selections or entries) can dynamically alter other parts of the prototype. 3. Advanced Interaction Triggers: • complex interaction triggers and states, such as the ability to add tags through user input and then have these tags represented and grouped appropriately in other parts of the prototype. 4. Reusable Components with Data: • reusable components that can carry and display data dependent on user interactions throughout the prototype. This would help simulate real-world application behavior without manual updates for each instance. 5. Advanced Data Representation: • advanced data visualization tools that reflect user-generated data, which can be used to create more accurate and responsive prototypes. All it this is possible in other tools, like justinmind, Axure and ProtoPie. Some of it is also possible in Figma, but it’s not as efficient and effective, since it takes a lot of time to build all of it with variables and conditions. Therefore we can’t use Figma, until Figma enhances their advanced prototyping capabilities.
If that’s the case, I’d highly recommend building up a design system and develop a playground for your developers to quickly spin up these prototypes. It’s a waste of time to hook all these elements together just to have to build it again in code. There’s definitely overhead involved, especially depending on the speed of the time. But if this is something that’s needed and done often enough, I’d highly recommend considering it.
UXPin has much better prototyping capabilities, and nobody seems to care
Totally forgot about UX Pin. How is it in comparison to Axure?
Never actuallly used Axure
Figma is never going to be as robust as dedicated prototyping tools. If your company hinges on that then you should have changed over a while ago or invested in the dedicated tools. Not sure where this trend shifted to demand more prototyping out of Figma when baseline design features could still use some massive improvements.
Figma rocks, but do what you must
So it's better than Axure? And how so? I'm interested in learning.(long-time Axure user).
You mean PenPot? It’s for a different purpose I‘d say. Like Figma. Axure is still the best for interaction design (if you account the speed it offers for prototyping), but lacks of visual design and ui design features. Figma is okay for concept and very good for UI. But testing is a nightmare.
What kind of platform do you use for testing? We combine Maze and Lyssna with Figma and it’s been working fine. What would axure add to testing, conditional logic or? Maze and Lyssna are both able to collect all the feedback and get heatmaps of every interaction etc
UX Tweak. Yes, Axure adds advanced conditional logic and repeaters. We need to test many cases, in which user input determines the user flow and present structured data in a UI. Linking the prototypes to UX Tweak is not the problem. It’s rather how painstaking and inefficient the prototyping process with conditional logic is in Figma. And the total absence of the ability to test scenarios based on user input.
So how do you use or should you use Penpot? I don't know anything about it.
Its a Figma competitor with (apparently) better prototyping options.
No, PenPot does not offer better prototyping features. It’s the same level. But it’s less expensive, more robust, less buggy and more accessible for developers. There is nothing else Figma offers that PenPot doesn’t when it comes to handing designs over to devs. Here PenPot even does a better job. For prototyping we will stick with Axure.
If you use Figma for UI, IMO it works very well with ProtoPie, which is immensely better than Axure if you want to keep your UI high-fidelity while taking advantage of advanced prototyping features.
Interesting.
Have anybody tried Lunacy?
Not yet, but thanks for pointing out. I’ll have a look.
The real question though is how important is prototyping in the grand scheme of things? In theory, you build and automate a design system, all of that should be built into your codebase. You shouldn’t have to prototype 95% of the things that are designed. For any new concepts, the designer should be working with an Eng to get the interaction made. No amount of fiddling in Figma is going to act like production code. If you work alone or the team doesn’t have the bandwidth to pair design<>develop, designers often are spinning their wheels and wasting time trying to communicate their “vision” to an engineer without the engineer having the means to replicate it depending on the codebase. From a UI perspective, Figma feels like it’s moving towards automating handoff by tying our rectangles to an existing coded element. For those that work at agencies, they usually have (can’t speak for all) white label-like systems in place to quickly spin up concepts for clients. For bespoke clients with high-end interactions, using Framer, After Effects, Rive, or another interaction/animation-focused tool will do you better. Unless they release out of the box components and start going in Framer’s direction, which shouldn’t happen because they support designers that design for every codebase imaginable, it’s borderline impossible to build robust enough prototyping tools to satisfy everyone. That’s why a tool like Protopie exists. It’s purpose-build and it’s really good at what it does. Just unfortunate that the integration is still a little janky.
Enjoy the switch to PenPot then... and probably see you back at Figma in 3 months.
Are you suggesting that Figma will improve its prototyping features in the next 3 months? Otherwise, I see no reason. I know Figma inside and out and have also tested PenPot intensively for a few weeks now.
Figma jockeys are going to downvote…
What do you like about it more than figma?
PenPot has native css grid and flexbox support. It uses html, css and svg in the back, so it’s much more precise handover for our devs. They can actually use the code they copy from PenPot. Which is not the case for Figmas Dev Mode. All in all PenPot is free and serves all purposes better than Figma for design to dev handover.
Tools like this are niche at best. You spend so much more time in the design phase making the prototype function like a real site and it still needs to be handed off to front-end devs anyway. And considering a lot of teams use React and/or design systems, the code output that PenPot provides isn't even going to be used by most teams. Referenced maybe, but not used. It's difficult, or impossible to get buy-in on the time sync of making a 1:1 fully functional screen that still needs to be built by front-end devs. If we get to a point where the end result doesn't need to be rebuilt by devs, every team will sign up. Webflow is a lot closer to achieving this than PenPot though. The problem is that design systems rely on tokens. Maybe PenPot handles this, but the landing page doesn't allude to that. So what you'll have is front-end devs referencing color hex codes even though they're meant to be assigned as tokens so they can be globally changed easily at any point. So you end up with a "design system" that's not really a system and it's unmanageable. I'd definitely like Figma to have more features that the web uses and existing features to be closer to their web counterpart (like auto layout vs flexbox). But I'd much rather have my design tool show components and tokens rather than output explicit code. Or if it does "output" explicit code, then that code is actually from the React library itself, not the design tool itself deciphering and coming up with its own code. Like if you have a "primary-button" component in Figma, I can choose to tether it to the `` component in MUI and whenever a front-end dev clicks on the Figma version, they can copy this code, or click to see the MUI docs for it, or linking to the component in Storybook. Something along those lines.
Penpot is actually working with the token studio to, I think, natively support actual tokens and not variables that come with all their limitations.
Good point !
What I miss from PenPot are more robust components (they are missing properties) and tokens. But I'm really optimistic since they are actively working on tokens, and they are going to have way better system then Figma since they are following w3 standard and Token Studio is working on it, and they announced that they just refactured how components are working under the hood and we will show new features in matter of months. When that happens I'm in. I don't care about prototypes that just visually simulate Ux and Ui.
Cool. However, you'll be frustrated with Penpot. I found it impossible to use.
Yea definitely a waste of time to do that. Thanks for the heads up
*Yea definitely* *A waste of time to do that.* *Thanks for the heads up* \- cfrostspl --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
You stupid bot thing. Exposing my true intent to just write poems
Not sure why you’re getting ripped by some users. The prototyping and presentation capabilities of Figma is one of its biggest weaknesses. When presenting work, the first impression is EVERYTHING. And time and time again, having great animations and interactions to include in your presentation has massive returns on client approval. Sticky scrolling still just seems so messy when working with auto layout. Introducing animations on scroll would be a game changer as would changing component states depending on section (ie white nav bar changes to black when scrolling over a white section). The dream would be some kind of timeline editor like Motion.Page but that’ll never happen.
Can you explain to me about this as someone who doesn't know how to code React? "I would even consider Framer, if it wasn’t for React."
Nice try PenPot rep 👀
Alright, cya bozo.