Note: Figma Design is always improving and some visual details shown in our videos may differ from the current version. Despite visual differences, the core functionality remains unchanged.
Why create interactive components?
Interactive components let you add prototype connections between variants directly inside a component set. When you add an instance to your designs, those interactions are automatically included, eliminating the need to manually prototype common interactions on every screen.
Interactive components help you ensure design consistency at scale. By managing interactions at the component-level, you create a single source of truth, enabling users to create realistic prototypes without having to worry about each individual element’s specific interaction patterns.
Interactive components also give developers a realistic view of how components should behave in different states, including timing, easing, and animation details that might get lost in static designs. This can reduce ambiguity and help improve the developer handoff process.
Without interactive components, prototyping even simple interactions requires creating numerous frames and manually adding prototype connections to account for every possible state combination. For example, think about an interactive checklist with five checkboxes. To create this, you would need to duplicate the original frame 32 times and create 160 prototype connections to cover every possible combination of checked and unchecked states!
With interactive components, achieving the same outcome only requires creating a component set with two variants (Checked, Unchecked) and two prototype connections. Instances automatically inherit these interactions, so you can simply duplicate the checkbox as many times as needed.
New to prototyping? Creating interactive components requires some understanding of how prototyping works in Figma Design. If you’re new to prototyping, check out our Guide to prototyping to become familiar with the core prototyping concepts, then explore the following resources for more hands-on learning experiences:
Additional resources
Learn more about interactive components with these additional resources:
- Help Center article: Create interactive components with variants
- Community playground file: Interactive components