Random links breaking when copy and pasting grouped menu with prototyped animations

[angelmerzdigital@gmail.com]

I finally acheived an actual functioning menu with some (not all) of the animations I promised my clients.  I'm using this menu primarily to allow my clients to navigate the artboards without having to use a temporary sitemap page or the Grid view within the shared link.

The structure is as follows:

Now this truly took me days to accomplish.  I'd say I put in at least 15 hours JUST on the menu.  I've now learned through many hours of troubleshooting that Adobe XD is extremely finicky when dealing with hover effects, groups, layers, masks, and components to the point where I hit walls constantly.  I finally solved it enough to build a beautiful menu that actually worked when I learned that this menu, for some reason, will only be fully functional in the artboard that I created it in.  When I copy and paste it into other artboards, random links will break even though they are built exactly the same (with all layers appropriately titled differently) and the prototype shows them as connected and fully functioning.  And when I say randomly, I truly mean randomly.  Sometimes it's the Care button that will no longer link, sometimes the hover effect on the search icon stops working, and sometimes the Donate link will break.  It doesn't matter if I even touch it.  If I copy and paste it from the Master Menu artboard that I created it in into other artboards it's just anybody's game.

At this point I'm exhausted.  My clients have been waiting 4 days to review the design for this website and I thought I finally had finessed my way through all of Adobe XD's failings  but this last one is stumping me.

On a side note, to the Adobe XD team, I feel that prototyping a menu should be something that is a no-brainer.  Over the past 15+ hours I've seen countless other posts describing issues of others who are simply trying to prototype menu functions (links, hovers, hovers within components, links within components) etc.  Without these basic things this simply can't be called a prototyping tool.  It can just prototype specific elements of a design.

I'd really appreciate any help that anyone could give me.  Since this is a WIP I cannot share the link to it but would be happy to share privately with Adobe support.  If push comes to shove I could also scrub this of any identifying characteristics and share that link.  Just let me know.

[Kenneth Kawamoto]

Sounds like a pain - if you copy & paste within Prototype view the interactions should be copied over. If you do this one section of the menu at a time, may be you can tell where it breaks?

[angelmerzdigital@gmail.com]

Thank you for the response!  Yes, I actually rebuilt the menu a few times to try out different tweaks to resolve issues and the latest version is the one with the least amount of errors.  I basically gave up on secondary animations (IE: hover to reveal dropdown, hover to animate overlay, and then click) and it's functioning but not perfect.  For some reason now the logo just refuses to link no matter what I do.

[Kenneth Kawamoto]

> For some reason now the logo just refuses to link no matter what I do

Do you mean you don't get the connecting handle from the logo, or it doesn't go to the destination in preview?

[Spas K.]

I feel your pain 🙂 So do people who upvoted this feature , which should have been there from the start.

I've been struggling with menus all the time, as I mostly design for web, and not flashy 3 screen apps that most people on youtube and Adobe keep showcasing features on.

Sadly, you're right, that when it comes to real production, there are a lot of holes in the process.

It would be nice to see the file so we can check out the links and how the whole thing is set up, otherwise it is hard to pinpoint whether it is a bug or misconfiguration. 

Generally, nested components and the whole hover state feature are so messed up I avoid them entirely. I show the functionalities/animations on one artboard and make the rest of the prototype without hovers and states, as simple as possible.