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UX Prototyping & Protopie

  • Principles
    • Educational
    • Figma Integration
  • Patterns, Pitfalls, Ploys
    • Patterns
    • Pitfalls
    • Ploys
  • More …
    • People-Centered Design
    • Thinking about AI
  • Principles
    • Educational
    • Figma Integration
  • Patterns, Pitfalls, Ploys
    • Patterns
    • Pitfalls
    • Ploys
  • More …
    • People-Centered Design
    • Thinking about AI

Playing with time

How to know whether something occurred

The message sending protocols between a scene and a component, or between pies (through Connect) are extremely powerful, but not entirely consistent. A message sent from a component to the current scene is received by itself, but one sent to Connect is not received by itself. How can you trigger a response if no-one has responded?

There are a variety of ways:-

  1. send a message to your self with a delay of 2-3 seconds after you sent to message to Connect. If you get a response from Connect then set a. flag variable, and when you receive the message from yourself, consult (and reset) that variable.
  2. Use a variable in a similar way – assign it a value with some delay (2-3 seconds) and then have a detect trigger  on it, which checks the flag variable in the same way as the message sending (above).

In general, set an event to happen at some delay after sending your message to Connect and then use that event to see if a response has come in from Connect.

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Most prototyping tools for designers use the frame-by-frame, or multiple dartboards model. But Protopie is much closer to a developer's object-oriented model of an application UI.

Rough, Rapid, Right

Working with Components

Use Components

It will often seem as though it will be faster to use individual elements than to use components, but in the end the time saving almost always goes the other way.

Origami Studio, Figma and others

How do these other popular platforms compare?

Use Variables

Variables are very powerful simplifying tool and they do not seem to have any impact on Protopie's performance.

Sending messages to two places

Whilst it is important to be careful in sending messages to the right places, it is also very powerful to send a message to two different places at the same time (or maybe with a small delay).

Good Prototyping Practice

IDEO's 3R prototyping principles from the late 1990s still apply - "Right, Rough, Rapid" but in the UX and UI space they are easily misunderstood.

Keep trigger and response names visible

Moving between Figma and Protopie

Use Components

Put code inside components

Viewing variables within Components

Playing with time

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© 2026 David Gilmore