Click on the “Rectangle” shape tool and drag it across your frame to create a rectangle that will serve as the main body of our dropdown. To create a dropdown in the Figma prototype, you’ll need to use the “Interactions” feature. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a dropdown in the Figma prototype using the steps below. Figma is a vector-based design tool that is growing in popularity for its user-friendly interface and wide range of features. One of the great things about Figma is that it offers a lot of options for prototyping your designs.

A Beginner’s Guide to Designing Components and Drop-Down Lists in Figma

While nested dropdowns may be necessary to house complex list options, if your Buttons or Dropdowns in FrontEnd Development menu requires more than two nested dropdowns, consider creating a separate dropdown for that category of options. Nesting too many dropdown menus makes it difficult for users to discover the nested options as they are hidden within multiple levels of menus. By breaking down the design into its atomic parts, we can create a reusable component for the list of items that maintain consistency throughout our design.

Make A Text, Hover Variant

• Stop wasting time on creating everything from scratch for every new project you start.
• To do this, create copies of the main rectangle body and place them right below.
• I shudder to think how upping the quantity to 5 like in your example would affect the numbers.
• To include a label and helper text, add text in a smaller font, around 12px, above and beneath your dropdown field.
• Set the gap to auto and alignment to the center, then set the horizontal and vertical padding to 10px.
• The user should be able to navigate the menu using the up and down arrows, while the left and right arrows should open and close nested dropdowns.
• As the user types, the list items narrow down to show only the results that contain the search query.

Ensure that the dropdown is visually distinct and easily recognizable from other UI elements. Consider the color, typography, and alignment to match the overall design system. For enhanced usability, implement clear indicators of the selected option and provide smooth animations for opening and closing the dropdown. The Figma Dropdown is a fundamental component that allows designers to create interactive and space-efficient menus or selection lists within their design projects.

Nested dropdown

• When the dropdown field is active, the border should indicate that it is currently open.
• Again, I kept only the components we’ll need to work with.
• But for this file, I removed most of the components, to minimize the confusion, and only left the ones we’ll need to work on, in the dropdown menu.
• Ensure that the dropdown is visually distinct and easily recognizable from other UI elements.
• Now, add text to the dropdown menu using the “Text” tool on the upper-left menu.
• Change the down chevron icon to an up chevron icon, or simply rotate it 180 degrees.

As a part of my Pinterest Clone in Figma exercise. After finishing all the complex steps, the dropdown menu is ready. If you do it right, you will have a result like the one below. You simply need to select the frame or object you want to use as your trigger and connect it to the resulting frame, then select a trigger event on the Interaction details window. Now when you click the trigger object, the dropdown menu will appear. VTo do this, first, make a design of your dropdown.

Create a text & link hover variant

In the next part of our series, we will look at how to style our dropdown list component and create different variants to suit our design needs. 405 interactions to build a product table with 3 products that could have a quantity between 1-3!! I shudder to think how upping the quantity to 5 like in your example would affect the numbers. I hate math, so I’ll let someone else do the number crunching.

In navigation or context menus, you can use multiple dropdown menus, which enforces the expectation on the user that selecting another menu item will result in a dropdown. In these cases, using a chevron may not be necessary because it takes up additional space. Using a hover state is sufficient for the user to understand that the dropdown menu item is selectable.

• I enjoy working with design tools, creating compilations, writing guides, and reviewing consumer tech and software.
• Just select the whole frame and press the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+C” to copy, then “Ctrl+V” to paste on the same canvas.
• If I was to do this again, I would create a product table with 2 products that could have a quantity between 1-2 (12 variations vs. 108).
• Dropdown menus use visual indicators that indicate the dropdown menu can be selected, such as a border surrounding a form field, a hover state, or a down chevron.
• To do this, connect the triangle on Frame 2 to Frame 1.
• We want to add an instance of our list component to each Active state variant of the dropdown component, so that we not only have an active dropdown field, but also the dropdown menu.

We’ll use auto-layout, components, and variants. We’ll create a prototype using interactive components. One of the most common UI components in product design is the dropdown menu. It’s a flexible component used in various contexts, such as forms, filters, navigation, or settings.

Develop Different Option States

Dropdown allows to present a list of selectable options to users, displayed in a collapsed form initially. In this article, we will learn how to create components and dropdown lists in Figma. We will also learn how to customize components and dropdown lists to meet our specific needs with programmer skills step-by-step instructions.