Best practices for iterating?

Aspiring UI designer here, just switched from XD to Figma and I’m loving it! I’m wondering what workflow people use for iterating on ideas.

Oftentimes, I’ll build a wireframe of a screen, and I’ll want to make a few different copies and tweak (or totally change) things to decide which version I like best. If I’m not using components, this is very straightforward, but it gets very tricky very fast if I have to keep track of all the components and instances across all the screens.

If you have any tips on how you manage this type of workflow, or links to video tutorials on the subject, that’d be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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There are many different sub-cases which need different approaches. Here are some we use:

  1. In Design - Sometimes 4-5 designers will swarm a design together as a brainstorming exercise and make a bunch of variants of something. It’s fun to work together. We have video chat on at the same time. Then we settle on an approach and erase the rest.
  2. Small difference - When I have a few versions of a small thing, I will stick a little meta-UI in the prototype that says “See version A, B, C” with links to each. I remove it when we decide.
  3. Flow variations - When I have one flow versus another, I will make a Title page with each flow and short explanation. Then you can click through. Oh, we have a “home” button in there too to get to the menu again.
  4. Completely different approaches - We either use different pages, or even different files. When the design library changed, we literally made a new Project and put files in there to keep them separate.

The trickiest thing is upgrading components. If you are not careful, you will blow away text labels in all the pages. We are very very careful about this and we still mess it up sometimes.

I hope this is helpful. :slight_smile:
Glen