Integrating ProtoPie into a Figma prototyping workflow

As designers, we’re always looking for new tools to further improve our design process. It’s important that we stay on top of cutting-edge tools and experiment with them. One such design tool that will foster your improvement as a designer is ProtoPie. ProtoPie is the second most used tool for prototyping, and it’ll likely grow in popularity.

Prototyping is an essential design skill. With stakeholders putting more and more emphasis on high-fidelity prototypes, ProtoPie is just the tool designers can use to meet such needs. Furthermore, ProtoPie’s compatibility with Figma, which has arguably become the number one tool for UX designers, makes it easier to integrate into your design workflow without complicating your entire design process.

Let me show you how to use ProtoPie as a plugin for Figma; this will undoubtedly get you familiar with its capabilities while you work with a tool you already know and love.

Understanding the ProtoPie plugin for Figma

ProtoPie requires no code and with its highly intuitive UI, it allows designers to create super realistic prototypes. You can use it to explore micro- and complex interactions across multiple screens.

Furthermore, prototypes created with ProtoPie can interact with smart device sensors, including the touchscreen, microphones, and more. This allows for a quicker turnaround on user testing. It can also help you create multiple iterations before you deliver the final design to developers.

Luckily for designers everywhere, ProtoPie offers plugins for major apps like Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma. This plugin helps you transfer designs to any of these major apps directly, allowing for the whole design and its individual components to be edited in your chosen design app.

Installing the ProtoPie plugin

Installation is as simple as any other Figma plugin:

1. Go to Files
2. Manage Plugins
3. Search ProtoPie
4. Install

Now, we can play around with ProtoPie!

Exporting designs from Figma to ProtoPie

You can export either a scene or an object directly from Figma to ProtoPie. Entire screens or simple buttons can be directly imported, eliminating the need to make tweaks to your design outside of Figma.

Take this design for a Flamethrower app I was working on below for example (Yes, you read that right: flamethrower app. I was messing around with a concept). First, I run the ProtoPie plugin and select the screen:

The plugin allows whole scenes to be selected, multiple at once. If you only need a button, then you can also select it as an object:

This comes especially in handy when making prototypes because often different versions of one object will exist at one time, which are easily interchangeable. Furthermore, as time goes on designs change, and this feature eliminates the need to import entire designs into Figma when making a small change. You can also prototype different versions of design components to see which would work better, which is also where this feature comes in handy.

Once you select your design, you can import it directly into ProtoPie where all individual frames can be edited for your prototyping needs:

Issues when importing

Like any plugin, there can be issues importing a design. While doing research, I found that four main issues can arise with this plugin of which I have experienced one personally. The newest version of this plugin has allegedly rectified all of these issues. However, you should still know these potential issues:

1. Frames being randomly duplicated: This was one of the two importing issues I’ve faced while using the plugin. In Figma, each object is its own frame. While importing a Figma design into ProtoPie, a random frame could be duplicated in the wrong place. While this is easy to fix because you can simply delete the frame and keep designing, it was a minor inconvenience.
2. Random rectangles being created: This was the second importing issue people faced, where random rectangles would be created across the design. This was also a minor inconvenience, which didn’t pose much of a problem once you deleted them.
3. The “Import failed” error: This was an issue not personally experienced by me, where designs would fail to be imported from Figma into ProtoPie and Figma would show an “Import failed” message. This often happens when you decline to update the plugin. This error has been solved with the newest plugin update.
4. Figma crashing: Attempting to export designs or objects from Figma could sometimes cause the application to crash.

All four of these issues should no longer be an issue with the newest version of the app, though.

Overview of ProtoPie

Once you import a design into ProtoPie, the UI is pretty intuitive. On the left side of the window, ProtoPie displays the different screens (or scenes as they’re named in ProtoPie). When you import multiple designs, they will come out as their own scene, which you can then move between using the triggers provided by the app.

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In the middle section of the UI, ProtoPie displays the design, and on the right side, the various tools used in the actual prototyping work:

ProtoPie is an amazing tool that’s not too hard to integrate. Integrating the use of ProtoPie in your Figma design process offers already experienced designers an intuitive environment in which they can turn their completed designs into impressive prototypes. Through the use of the ProtoPie plugin, these designs can be directly imported and transformed into dynamic prototypes seamlessly without interrupting the design process, allowing for an increase in efficiency and for the designer’s creativity to flourish.

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