I’m glad to see all the advances Figma is making toward making a more robust prototyping tool. There have been some exciting new features in the past year that have made Figma a more serious tool for prototyping. As some who has created motion systems at a number of companies (Google, Facebook, Compass), I’ve noticed one glaring omission to Figma’s prototyping tool that I would really like to see added. There needs to be a way to create and share custom durations and easing curve primitives/tokens as a system. As products mature, there is a real need to have a defined system for easings and durations and to be able to share and reuse them easily. Currently, we can use smart animate and customize the curve and duration for one off transitions, but we really need the ability to create presets on something like a drop down menu and then be able to share that with the rest of the product team.
This one simple tool would make communication between designers, motion, and eng much easier and enable designers to more easily and accurately mock up transitions and other motion with the right timing and curves and then hand it off to eng. As someone creating motion systems, I don’t want to leave it up to designers or engineers to decide what the duration and speed should be as it leads to fragmentation and other problems and then we have to recode it each time. System teams already build these types of primitives in code to translate from apps like After Effects to engineering, but we really need to have it in Figma where product designers are doing most of their work. As someone who focuses on motion systems for the whole team, I’d like to be able to create the a system in Figma along with some guides on when and where to use the primitives, and then be able to share those primitives with my team via Figma.