Tinder card swipe — Figma Prototyping
Tinder’s card swiping is an iconic and unique interaction when it comes to mobile app user experiences. In this article I’m going to show you how easy it is to re-create in Figma using Interactive Components.
TL;DR;
If you don’t feel like reading this tutorial, maybe you’ll enjoy watching this instead. Check out the video version of this tutorial from YouTube!
- YouTube video
- Clone this project from the Figma community file
Setup
The setup for this is very simple. There’s just a single “Main Screen” frame that is a clone of the Tinder app UI. In addition to that there is a “card” component that will become our interactive component in later steps.
Creating variants
Now let’s duplicate the “card” component and then wrap it with an other frame. Then give the new frame a name that will indicate that it’s an interactive component. In this example I’ll use a name “swipeable-card”. Then also include the name of the state in the frame name separated by the slash character. So the complete frame name is “swipeable-card / idle”.
It’s also a good idea to add a layout overlay to the frame that just covers the frame uniformly. This will help us in the later steps.
Next, create three copies of the frame and update their names as follows:
- “swipeable-card / nope”
- “swipeable-card / touch down”
- “swipeable-card / like”
I also recommend you to order the frames something like this to make it easier to work on.
Now select the “card” component inside the “idle” frame and turn off its drop shadow. We are going to stack these on top of each other in the prototype frame and we don’t want the drop shadows to multiply them selfs when they are stacked. Also select the “like” and “nope” elements inside the card component and set the elements opacity to 0%.
Quick tip: You can double press the zero key on you keyboard’s number row to quickly set any frames opacity to 0%. Single press sets the opacity back to 100%.
Repeat this step for the other frames, but on the “nope” frame leave the nope element visible and on the “like” frame leave the like element visible.
Next select the card component inside the “nope” frame and rotate it 15 degrees to the left. This is easiest if you hold down shift while rotating. Then move the “card” component slightly down and left until it’s outside of the “nope” frame boundaries. Although make sure to not actually drag it out of the “nope” frame.
Then repeat this step for the “like” frame, but this time rotate 15 degrees to the right and also move the “card” component to right.
At this point you can turn all of the “swipeable / …” frames into components. Then select all of them and click “Combine as variants” from the right hand side panel. You might also want to turn off the “Clip content” toggle on the “swipeable-card” variant frame.
While you have the “swipeable-card” selected also rename the default property name to “State.”
After that you should have something that looks like this.
Interactive component
Activate the prototype tab from the right hand side panel. Select the card component in the “idle” frame and then create an interaction connection into the “touch down” frame. Make sure the interaction type is “Touch down” or “Mouse down”. The available option varies based on your prototype settings. And also make sure the animation type is set to “Smart animate”.
Now select the “card” component from the “touch down” frame and add an interaction connection going back into the idle frame. Apply the same settings, but change the interaction type to be “Touch up”.
After that select the “card” component from the “touch down” frame again and add a connection going into the “nope” frame. But this time the interaction type should be “On drag”. And finally add a third connection that goes into the “like” frame and also set its interaction type to be “On drag”.
Now we are ready to add our interactive component into the screen frame from the resources menu.
Finishing touches
Now let’s add some images into our design. I like to use the Unsplash plugin to do this.
Select the “image” layer on the card component and then click an image from the Unsplash plugin to add it into your design.
Now duplicate the “swipeable-card” component and repeat the step of adding an image into the card. Repeat this as many times as you want there to be swipeable cards on you prototype.
Once you have enough cards on your prototype, then select the bottom most “swipeable-card” component and set its state to be “touch down”. This is because we want there to be one drop shadow visible on the prototype.
And there it is, Tinder card swipe interaction with Figma!
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Also, don’t forget to checkout my Youtube channel for more content like this:
