Figma Interactive Components — Practical Tips
Tags: Interactive Components, Figma, UI Design, Design Tutorial, Prototyping

Figma regularly introduces features that are extremely useful, amaze designers, and even boost their creativity.

It started with Variants. The feature helps to organize Components in a more efficient way. Finding components with Variants is much quicker. Modifying their appearance in a way similar to real solutions behavior is a real pleasure. When I work in Figma now, I cannot imagine my workflow without them.

This time I will show you how to get started with Interactive Components — revolutionary feature for prototyping. I will also share some additional tips for more advanced purposes.

Grab the mug of your favorite coffee ☕️, and let’s dive into Figma Interactive Components!

What are Interactive Components in Figma?

Interactive Components are features that allow you to create a prototype with UI elements that reacts to specific interactions.

It is worth mentioning that you may prepare interaction not only for “on click” action but also “on drag,” “while pressing,” “while hovering,” “keyboard clicks,” and things triggered automatically thanks to the “delay” feature. This gives you the ability to prepare a prototype that successfully imitates a real solution.

Creating interactive elements is very easy. In the next section I will show you how to do that. Let’s make interactive button.

Sample Button Component

How to Create Interactive Component

To prepare a UI element that will be interactive, you have to prepare the Component with it. Then duplicate it to create the next Components for various states of this specific UI element.

Button States

Now, select these components and create Variants from the group. Interactive Components work only for elements that are variants.

Variants

When you are ready with your Components, switch to Prototype mode by clicking the tab in the top right corner of the Figma window.

Select the first Component and press a little circle on the right side of it. Click the handle and drag it to connect with the other Component. This is how you create interaction.

Connecting Components

When two components are connected, you may configure the interaction. Choose the interaction type from the dropdown — it may be “on click” to start with. Select animation type, and your first interactive Component is ready!

Interactive Component in Prototyping Mode

To check it out, create the instance of the Component (drag default component out of the Variants area) and click the “Play” button to launch the prototype.

That’s it! It is very simple to achieve powerful results with this feature.

Practical Tips

Creating Interactive Component is fast and easy. However, if you want to make more professional Interactive Components, here are some additional practical tips for more advanced purposes:

1. Use for more interactions than “on click”

As we know, buttons, checkboxes, and other UI controls should react to different interactions, not only clicking them. Figma allows you to prepare various states, so use them in your prototypes to achieve better results!

2. Use Smart Animate

Changing the state of the element feels more natural when the transition is animated. Figma allows you to use the Smart Animate feature to prepare a nice motion design for your Interactive Components. Just remember to keep the same layer names within components so the feature will know how to animate the transition.

Interactive Components Settings

3. Use Custom Easing

When you start using Smart Animate, you will surely notice that to make your transition even more natural, you may pick various easing types for animation. There is also an option to prepare a “custom” one, so feel free to play around with this feature. Results may be impressive!

Interactive Components Sample

Feel free to get the sample Figma file with Variants and presented above Interactive Components. This may be the perfect starting point for your prototypes:

👉Get Figma Sample Interactive Components Now.

One more thing!

If you prefer watching tutorials instead of reading them. Feel free to watch the how to video showing how to create interactive button:

Figma Interactive Components in 3 minutes

To conclude

Interactive Components are the feature that brings not only better usability to our prototypes but brings some joy to our designs. The feature allows us to achieve remarkable results with just a few clicks!

What will you create with Interactive Components now?

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Thanks for reading!