Practical examples of how to build a simple hover state prototype with some of the most popular prototyping tools on the market.
There are tons of options available for UX designers to prototype a user experience and you may not know what are the pros and cons of each tool just yet. The main goal of this post is to give you a taste of each tool’s prototyping workflow by taking you through the process of building a simple hover state example. By the end of these exercises, you should have a high-level idea of the jobs that are suitable for each of the tools.
Since the goal is to get a quick understanding of the prototyping tool’s workflow, we don’t need to be too fancy. A simple button hover prototype that alters the button background color should do the job. Below are the two component states we will be animating between.
Here is a quick spec of the button background style:
- Default background color: #3B42F4
- Hover background color: #767BF8 (or 70% opacity of the default)
Instead of Invision Studio, we’ll do an Invision web example because it is the most popular prototyping tool based on 2018 Design Tools Survey. Since this is a screen linking tool, the only way to prototype the hover state is to build a hover link hotspot.
Step 1: Start by setting up two screens with each of the button states. You will need to design the buttons in another design tool of your choosing then upload the two states to Invision.
Step 2: Setup a hotspot over the default button with ‘Screen as Overlay’ link to the hover screen. Make sure to un-check the ‘Stay on target screen’ to allow the hover out.
Result: You should now have a functioning button hover state.
Pros:
Invision is fairly straightforward and that’s its advantage. You can essentially prototype hover states between any two static screens. Updating design is as easy as uploading a new mockup.
Cons:
The transition animation is limited and lacking sequence. Therefore if you require elements to transition one after another with fancier effects then this may not be the right tool of choice.
Framer has come a long way from being viewed as a super-advanced prototyping with code tool to now a design tool with prototyping capabilities. There are a couple of ways you can prototype a hover state in Framer X. We are going to go over the code override method because that’s more unique to Framer and it’s not too complex.
Step 1: Create the button designs as a Frame (Need to be in a frame to attach override to). We only need the default button here as we can apply the hover state as an override.
Step 2: With your button frame selected, hop over to the properties panel on the right and add an override. Go with the default ‘Example’ file, and for the override dropdown, choose the hover option.
Step 3: If you click on the preview prototype option at the top right corner (play icon) you can interact with this button and see it’s current hover state, which is a default scaling effect taken from the example override file.
Step 4: So far we’ve applied a hover state to your button design layer and applied an example hover override to it. Let’s look at the override code and modify it to meet our spec. From the Override properties panel, click on ‘Edit Code’. You should then see a code editor (don’t worry, we won’t be coding much to make this example work).
Step 5: What we need to do now is to modify the “Hover() function” starting on line 9 that looks like the code block below. Instead of the “whileHover: { scale: 0.8 }”, which monitors a mouse hover to the button layer and when it’s being hovered it scales the layer to 80% of its original size, we want to modify this to “whileHover: { opacity: 0.7 }” as shown below:
export function Hover(): Override { return { whileHover: { opacity: 0.7 }, }}
Result: The override now should adjust the opacity of the layer to 70% of the original opacity to simulate the hover effect we want.
Pros:
The override code components (not covered in this post) are flexible and powerful methods to build high-fidelity prototypes. You can prototype anything that’s feasible from a technical perspective.
The override on top of the design layer is a good half step to leverage some of the code-level prototyping features but not completely jumping into the full code setup.
Cons:
The coding part always have a bit of a learning curve for designers regardless of how elementary. While Framer is a powerful tool, it requires a good amount of time invested to learn the tool if the designer is new to coding.
Native prototyping feature was introduced since Sketch 49. However, the feature only supports artboard linking on click and lacks hover interaction. Therefore, to prototype hover animation we need to turn to Sketch plugins. There are a few animation plugins available. For this example, we will use the Anima plugin.
Step 1: You need to set up an artboard with the default button style.
Step 2: Assuming you have the plugin installed and activated. On the bottom right panel, you should see the Anima plugin section. We’ll use the interaction feature under the prototype tab. Select the button background and hit that ‘create’ button.
Step 3: You will then be taken to the Anima editor, where a new state of the button (this is where you specify what the hover state is) will be created for you. To build the minimal hover state prototype:
- Select the default/state1 button background layer
- A blue lightning bolt icon will be revealed. Click on that icon and connect the line to state2
- Choose the on ‘On Mouse Enter’ option. This is to set what interaction should trigger the state transition
- Select the state2 button background and adjust the opacity to 70% to set the hover style
- Repeat similar steps to connect the state2 button back to state1 ‘On Mouse Leave’
- Click on ‘Back to Sketch” on the very top left of your screen to exit the editor
Result: Back to the sketch interface, at the bottom right you should see the Anima section with a ‘Preview in Browser’ button. Click on that will spin up a preview browser tab that lets you play with the button hover state prototype.
Pros:
If you are designing with Sketch then the ability to prototype within the same environment is helpful.
Cons:
The prototyping features out of the box may not support exactly what you are trying to simulate. You’ll need to lean on third-party plugins, which has various complexity and learning curve.
Figma recently released more prototyping features that allow designers to build more advanced prototypes within the design environment. The new feature makes it fairly easy to build our example so let’s walk through that.
Step 1: Set up two frames with each button state design layers.
Step 2: With the default button background layer selected, toggle to the prototype tab located within the right panel.
Step 3: Click on the dropdown to select the ‘While Hovering’ option, second dropdown to ‘Swap with’, set the last dropdown to the name of your second frame.
Result: You should now see an arrow connecting the default button background to the second frame. Click on the present (play icon) located at the top right corner will allow you to play with the hover prototype.
Pros:
With the new Smart Animate feature, prototyping a hover interaction is fairly easy once you have the before and after states created.
Cons:
It lacks support for setting custom animation sequences. If you need to animate multiple items in the same interaction with various speed then that is currently not possible.
There are more tools out there to help with UX prototyping and there isn’t a perfect tool for every job. If you are serious about learning how to prototype well, finding the right tool(s) for the job is critical. Small exercises like the hover examples in this post can help you wrap your head around the strength and weaknesses of a tool.
Thanks for taking the time to go through each of the examples. Hopefully, you now have a high-level idea of how to use each of the tools mentioned and you will have some baseline knowledge when you need to choose a tool to prototype your designs in the future.