I’ve seen this bug be a thorn in many people’s side for the last 3 years and nothing seems to have been done about it.
When prototyping and viewing said prototype, there appears to be no definitive way to get the screens to display in the correct order. If I’m presenting a visual to a client, I need a way to cycle back and forth between screens with ease. My only options at the moment seem to be restarting the prototype or creating hotspots in my design to cycle back to the previous slide.
I would heavily suggest that the best and most intuitive way around this bugbear is to have pagination defined by layer order. Allowing the layer panel to be visible in presentation mode, along with a way to jump to a specified screen would save many of us time and reduced mental anguish.
Has anyone ever found a plugin that fixes this problem, or at least makes it a less frustrating experience?
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This needs to happen.
It needs to follow the way that Invision works.
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I saw similar topics were closed without any answers, so I’m opening it up again:
How can I organize the pagination within a prototype to use the arrow keys for navigation?
It doesn’t depend on the structure of the left layer panel. So if I use the arrow keys to navigate through the prototype it sometimes shows a wrong screen and I have no indication why that is happening or how I can influence the order.
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It should just follow the frame order in the left panel, if you have not bothered to set a flow. If you are in a pre-set flow, the bottom arrow navigation should follow that flow, regardless of frame order. I thought it used to do that actually, but the basic navigation is clearly is following the visual order of the screens, going left to right, then the next “row” of screens, etc. It’s not how people think or work.
I have this issue as well and just wanted to state that a previously closed chat here in the forum on the same topic does not solve the issue. @tank666 states:
Change the order of the frames on the canvas in your file. Note: Figma orders frames based on their co-ordinates in the canvas. First, by their x co-ordinate from left to right, then their y co-ordinate from top to bottom. If the y co-ordinate is offset in any way, then frames may appear out of order. To fix, you can set horizontal alignment for each row of frames to align-top.
My prototype is more complex than this. I have 32 frames and nearly double that in hotspots. Horizontally aligning all the screens would make extra work and (according to numerous others in the forums) not solve this problem. I’d like to add a comment from Gavin McFarland on a 2018 archived Spectrum chat on this very topic as it perfectly mirrors my problem with this issue:
I guess I don’t understand why you would order the frames by their respective hotspots. Screens that are connected by a flow don’t necessarily follow a linear hierarchy, so I don’t know how you can predict what order is best for the author.
So, Figma, is there a way as @anon9570724 stated in the opening comment to paginate based on layer order? Or some other manual way to reorder the screens that is not based on hotspots or x/y-axis positioning? Would love to know! Thanks 
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Hi, I have tried to figure out why navigation in preview mode is so difficult / time consuming to set up. I can’t be the only one with this problem. I want to use arrows to navigate and I also want to make a top menu bar so that there are two ways of navigating through a design manual. It seems I am only able to do one at a time.
If I make a menu and link it to the different pages it won’t allow me to use arrows to navigate.
If I don’t use a menu it allows me to use arrows to navigate and it will show order based on how the Figma file is set up.