4 Feature Updates that need to be implemented in Figma in 2024

Figma has firmly established itself as the leading prototyping tool for UI designers. Under the visionary leadership of Dylan Field and propelled by an ever-growing library of plugins, it’s evident why Figma has asserted its dominance in the prototyping market.

Recent game-changing additions, such as variables and conditions, have revolutionized the management of design tokens and seamlessly integrated programming logic into the prototyping workflow, demonstrating Figma’s commitment to innovation.

However, Figma is not without its challenges, some of which have persisted for years, causing friction in the prototyping process. Addressing these issues could significantly enhance the user experience. Here, we highlight several feature updates that Figma should consider in 2024 to further elevate its platform.

Incorporate X/Y coordinates in overlays

Configuring overlays in Figma is a relatively simple process that offers significant advantages in streamlining the prototyping of complex flows.

Designers can choose to let Figma automatically position overlays using predefined options or manually position them. However, manual positioning demands meticulous attention to detail to ensure pixel-perfect precision.

Introducing the ability to specify X and Y coordinates for overlays provides users with precise control over their placement. This is particularly valuable when multiple overlays need to be seamlessly integrated, such as for a series of dropdowns, allowing designers to maintain consistent accuracy throughout their designs.

Access nested properties from multiple instances

When you choose a single instance, a list of component properties is displayed in the right panel. If the instance contains nested instances, each with its unique properties, those properties will also be visible alongside the primary instance.

Nevertheless, when you select multiple instances in bulk, the component properties of nested instances become inaccessible. This constraint necessitates users to individually select each instance to modify the properties of the nested ones. This redundancy becomes particularly evident when the same change needs to be applied to a specific property across all nested instances.

Having the ability to access the nested properties from multiple instances will save designers a large amount of time when making identical changes to nested properties from multiple instances.

Retain component properties when creating new components from detached instances

When you detach an instance, all the properties linked to that instance are removed. This behavior is expected because the layer is no longer part of the component set, rendering the component properties irrelevant for the detached layer.

In some situations, you might find it necessary to experiment with an instance before converting it back into a component. To achieve this, you would detach the instance, customize it, and then convert it back into a component. However, detaching instances results in the loss of their original component properties, which means you’ll need to reconfigure those properties from scratch.

A convenient workaround is to employ nested instances within the variant. Detaching the parent instance does not affect the nested instances (although the reverse is not true), allowing them to retain their component properties. However, it’s important to note that the properties directly associated with the parent instance are still lost during detachment.

To enhance the user experience, it would be beneficial for Figma to provide a feature that enables users to retrieve the original properties associated with the parent instance, thus eliminating the need to recreate them from scratch.

Extend application of number variables

This feature update will most probably be incorporated in the next version of variables, but I thought I would mention it anyway.

The number variable can be used not just to populate numbers, but can also be used for represent the width, height and border radius. However, not all quantifiable aspects of the panel have access to variable integration.

Some aspects such as X/Y coordinates as well as angle cannot be automated by variables. Figma is most likely going to extend this feature to all aspects of the panel that apply to the 4 variable types. This update would extend the potential of using variables to further build more streamlined components with dynamic interactions.