Simplify your component using boolean property on Figma🏖️

My journey in the design field has changed a lot. At the beginning, it’s similar to a newcomer who struggling with the complexities. However, after gaining around 2 years of experience, my understanding has greatly improved. This transformation began when I became familiar with Figma’s boolean property. This discovery completely changed how I handle design components.

Now, I stand as someone who wants to share their experience and hopefully provide assistance 😉🌸

The picture above (before) represents a little personal experience of mine during a UI revamp. I feel overwhelmed when trying to organize and categorize variant and components about chat list so they could be used in different conditions (What I’m facing has more conditions than this🫠)

So, here’s a step-by-step guide to make it simpler and neater💡

Objective: Here, I want to create multiple conditions for the chat list on a messaging app.

🤔 Thinking about any possible conditions that might occur

In this initial step, you are asked to think about any possible conditions that could happen, so you can refer to the next step. This step is important to make sure we found nothing missing and changes can be managed along the way.

👩🏻‍💻 Begin designing by displaying all the conditions that will appear.

After we know what conditions we want to achieve, we need to ensure all components that will appear on the card are displayed. An examples in this image is:

• Condition: Profile Photo
• Condition: User’s name
• Condition: Chat description uses an icon.
• Condition: Chat list is muted.
• Condition: Chat list has message notifications.

✈️ Turning frames into components

When the conditions we’ve thought of earlier become a frame, we transform them into a component by: right-clicking and selecting “Create Component,” or clicking the frame and going to the app bar, then clicking the component icon. If successful, the frame will turn purple.

🎉Yay! create component success!🎉

👾 Start adding boolean property to each condition you want to modify.

In this step, we ware required to reconsider whether these conditions are already final or if they can be further simplified. In the 5 cases mentioned above, the conditions for having a profile photo and user name must be present in all 5 conditions. Therefore, we can conclude that we are left with only 3 distinct conditions:

• Condition: Chat description uses an icon.
• Condition: Chat list is muted.
• Condition: Chat list has message notifications.

Let’s adding boolean property.. 🎮 🎮 🎮

First, Chat description uses an icon
Click on the icon within the message content and find the “Layer” section on the right side and click boolean property. Next, the component properties will appear and please input the appropriate name. On my case, I’m entering the condition with “Desc with Icon.”

Second, Chat list is muted
Click on the mute icon and find the “Layer” section on the right side and click boolean property, then click “Create Property.” Next, the component property will appear, and please input the appropriate name. On my case, I’m entering the condition with “Muted”

Third, Chat list has message notifications.
Click on the notification icon and find the “Layer” section on the right side and click boolean property, then click “Create Property.” Next, the component property will appear, and please input the appropriate name. On my case, I’m entering the condition with “Notifications”.

Last, 🚀 it’s DONE! 🚀 Ready to use and modify according to the needed conditions.

Once the component is created, please copy the parent and use it as needed.

So…

📚 With 1 component chat list mentioned above, you can generate 8 different conditions which can make documentation simpler and clearer.

Thats it! I hope the explanation regarding simplifying components in Figma using boolean property can proves to be helpful and beneficial. Thanks and see ya!👋🏻☀️