The prototype viewer (both modal and separate tab view) is really buggy when working with variables. Sometimes it shows the two updates in the example I’ve made on click interaction and other times it doesn’t.
In my example, Clicking on the ‘cast’ tab is supposed to change the string in the search field and also swap out the SERP content beneath it (a variable). So I’m changing the string in the first, and swapping the variant instance in the second.
In some play-throughs the one of the things will change but not the other (and it varies which one works), other times neither work and then sometimes both work!
I think I’ve got fairly simple things happening here so surprised to see this level of bugginess. Am I doing something wrong?
I’ve tried using variables for an important project and after a few hours of trial and error (mostly error) I simply gave up. There was too much unpredictable and unexplainable behavior. Most prone to error is going back and forth between screens that contain components with stateful interactions. You simply can’t predict what’s going to happen to these components once they exist on two different frames in different states, esp. when smart animate is involved. I think eventually Figma will need to add a debug console of some sort, if you’re going to stick with Variables. Because it’s gonna get buggy like software! And you will want to be able to view the values of variables as you’re running the prototype.
