Prototyping: past, present, and future - Jon K, Nikolas K, Chia A, Garrett M (Config 2023) 

Amazing! 🎉 Cant wait to play with this

The recent updates really amazed me. One thing you can add to make or design and interaction more appealing is to add zoom in and zoom out animation (like pop up). As we click on small card it comes bigger and takes whole screen and animated from small to big like zoom effect.Thanks

While I'm absolutely stoked about variables and tokens and being able to design with fewer screens, one thing I'm curious about is how this will affect the handoff process to devs. While creating one separate screen for each and every state is super tedious for a designer, the advantage of it is that devs can clearly see empty states, selected states, etc. throughout the entire flow. Will the future of handoff be that devs are expected to click through interactive prototypes to understand requirements, rather than looking at a bunch of arrows and and notes on a canvas? If so, how will I make sure they try *every* important flow in the click-thru prototype? For example, maybe they try the "Add to cart" flow and know they are supposed to implement it, but they miss the part about how a discount must appear when the cart reaches $100. Currently, I communicate flows to my devs by putting lots of arrows on the canvas that say where each button leads to. I hate doing this, but I feel that it is necessary because if I just link them an interactive prototype for them to explore, they might not click on every single button and might miss some flows or states. My current solution is writing down what I call "missions" in the Flow descriptions where I list out all the flows that I expect the devs to go through in the prototype. However, these "missions" are often missed because they are hard to read (the text is quite small in the Flow description panel), and they are inconvenient to edit; I have to select the frame that has the Starting Point, click the pencil icon, and then finally edit the description. There is no way to do this directly from the prototyping panel. I wonder if a better solution would be some sort of built-in "Missions" feature where stakeholders must complete all the tasks and check them off as they go to make sure they covered all the important flows. Would be curious to know how other teams solve this problem :D Thank you Figma for keeping my job fun. Every two-ish weeks you launch something new and it makes me excited to get up for work the next day and build new things. Thank youuu!!!

Figma how do you sign up to be a participant in user research?

Cool but is not possible to create variables inside of a component with animation, for that reason when you add a product appears instant, and still, we cannot see any example using variables for a a simple dropdown navigation.

Dear @Figma. Hate not being able to move anything in dev mode. Everything on my canvas automaticly gets locked, making it impossible to be flexible and demonstrate changes when discussing layouts together with a developer in dev mode. Having to switch back to design mode in order to be able to move things and then back again to dev mode to see specs is NOT a very good solution. It was much better before when my canvas didn't become locked in specs.

Prototyping is seen as an OPTIONAL step at the end of the design process ???? Bummer! It just confirms my own observation that figma isn’t the tool for those of us who practice user-centered design!

Figma isn’t suitable for UX freelancers who are paid by the hour and want to keep a competitive price/output ratio. The hours spend for ‘file hygiene’ and troubleshooting interaction bugs within complex, nested components is just enormous! In order to arrive at an orderly page like the one you show us here when using variables, it still takes a lot of trial and errors and wasteful production of components. It would be unfair to charge those hours to clients.