But what if you want areas that are smaller than the visible elements? Tooltips nested in the hover state blow up the hit area. Any way to mitigate this?

I've just tested this, and the previous comment is correct — padding does not carry over to prototyping mode.

I just tried it and the padding is not carried over in prototyping mode...

I'm getting tired of all the empty boxes I need to draw to be able to have a larger area that's clickable.. I see that defining you 'hit area' is in the plans, but that was over 3 years ago.. Please..?

Need this feature so bad! Otherwise people don't know where to click if there are no "hints"

This feature is badly required!!!!!

I would like to see drag and drop to hot spot functionality.

This link shows what I am going for:

https://xd.adobe.com/view/00c6b460-6153-4411-6daa-92c30373e62e-76f7/

Custom Hot-spot in Prototype mode is Highly Required as we can add this in Invision adobe should take this feature on priority or might people will opt out for Invision instead.

PLEASE add the option to make custom hotspots. I made wireframes on Sketch and wanted to use Adobe XD's prototype function to link screens. Making the invisible rectangles is not ideal.

I agree with the inability to draw a hotspot is not ideal, but a workaround is to create a transparent rectangle around the tap-target (if text or icon) and make it a component. That way you can attach the interaction to the whole component.

YES. Working on a prototype for a brand that uses tiny, elegant type, and it's killing the usability of the prototype. PLEASE let us pad the hot spots. I even tried adding a 30 pixel stroke around the type, and setting the stroke to 100% transparent, but it did not expand the hit area.

Please add this. It is helpful for those who may be transitioning (or evaluating) from the Sketch to Invision flow. I for example imported my massive Sketch files over. I have a horizontal menu in a bunch of pages that, out of convenience, shares the same text box (with just equal spaces between menu options). In Invision I would have been able to just make my own hot spots for these, but now I have to recreate the menu across a bunch of pages. Obviously I will not create such menus going forward if I knowingly plan to use XD for prototyping, but it did catch me off guard, and I can see many cases where custom hot spots would be quite desirable anyhow.

Please add this feature it would help to get from png page icons and any step back or forward will be helpful

Please ad this feature, it would greatly benefit the creativity of XD if you could make the interactive area in any shape and not limited to a rectangle. Would be great to have the option to choose between a rectangle interactive area or just the fill/outline of your custom shape. This could for example allow you to create a clickable world map, where you can click on each different country or state. The limitation of the rectangular interactive area make this option completely impossible.

Make sure the Fill is enabled, otherwise you'll need to select shape by it's border. By default, the Fill is off for Path objects. Hope this helps.

Would be great with a custom hotspot shape. Any closed vector shape should be a potential hotspot.

Please add this!

Another thought: Have a shortcut to start a link, like W, and then once the link is started you can hit the number keys to add 10px multiples of padding. (1 = 10px, 2 = 20px, etc.)

Example Workflow:
1. Click Element 2. Hit "W" 3. Hit "2" 4. Click Destination

That would give you a link with 20px padding, and it would faster than dragging out a wire (current system)

Wow, 2 years ago. . . sigh

The prototype target tooltip window has a very small hover area. If you don't move the mouse precisely from the trigger to the target window, it auto closes. Very frustrating causing you to have to re-click many times and very precisely move the mouse to use prototyping features.