How to Create Native Drag and Drop Functionality in JavaScript

Improving user experience with intuitive interaction design

Drag and drop functionality is a common feature. It creates a more intuitive user flow by letting users grab and drop objects to places where they want them to be. There are countless of JavaScript libraries out there just for this purpose. Include one for every possible framework. However, this can be done quite simply with the native Drag and Drop API. This is what we will take a look at.

At the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to create the following drag and drop functionality for a Kanban board:

Setting Up the DOM

Let’s start by setting up the DOM first. Create an index.html file at your project’s root folder and add the following: