Indeed, this problem makes it impossible to use Figma for prototyping, so I am now using another product (UXPin) instead. How ridiculous. ​@Guillaume_Coquoz can you give us some insight as to why this ‘feature’ even exists in the first place? I will eat my hat if you tell me that more people asked for it (or anyone asked for it at all) than have complained about it. Really bad, nonsensicle product decision.

​@Guillaume_Coquoz If you were to combine all the complaints in different threads, there would be more - e.g.

​@Jaz Wilkinson I’m not working for Figma so I can’t tell you exactly why the feature exist but I guess it have something to do with pishing prevention and security measures. Which is a real use case to be solved, don’t get me wrong.

​@dvaliao Jaz’s comments shows exactly what I’m trying to state (and there is many other similar comments); this feature breaks your product and encourage your paying customers to go look for other products to do the job Figma is supposed to do. That’s probably something you don’t want to happen. No matter how many Likes on a customer forum topic.

I see ​@Guillaume_Coquoz thanks. I did assume it was a security feature at first, but that fact that it goes away if users are logged into Figma suggest that it is not essential. I really don’t want to go to the place to think that it is a dark UX pattern to force you to have to give every user research participant you work with a Figma login to be able to run a sensible user test, but I cannot see any other reason why this is like this.

IMHO Figma don’t have a great understanding or sense of priority for the user testing process - something that all designers should be doing, but in my experience, most don’t do enough of. Partly, because Figma makes it so hard.

It is absolutely not practical to give a Figma account to every user research participant, that are random people you will engage with once and never see again. Just blows my mind that someone thought that was a sensible solution.

Using external links without a warning screen was the major reason I switched to Figma. When I was testing (while signed-in) external links worked like a charm. Now realizing my error in not digging deeper into the weeds is unfortunate and deflating .

​@dvaliao is liking the original post considered upvoting? If not, please let me know how to cast a vote to the urgency of this major pain point.

To all who learned this long before me, thank you for sharing.
For all those after me please upvote, upvote, upvote .

Hopefully  this will happen before I am fully grey .

Please fix this, this ruins the illusion of a working prototype and causes confusion for the test participants.

The dreaded interstitial step has reared its head again when accessing external links in figma slides! Can we please get it removed - It looks like an error step