Design System - Effective Enterprise Digital Product Development strategy

In digital product development, you may struggle to maintain design consistency and productivity. A design system can help your team and brand keep things consistent and provide a better user experience with your product. Let’s discuss what makes an ideal design system and how it benefits the organization.

What is a Design System?

If we oversimplify the definition of a design system, it can be a component library, brand guideline, or style guideline. However, a design system is not a single library or guideline. It is a set of sources that all different teams can align with docs, tools, design, and principles to build a digital product. Here is an example: you might notice the design and product team are continually updating the product and consistently creating the same button for every update, or they struggle with finding the exact color code that they used before. That is why your team needs a design system. A design system can help your team create visual consistency and help them reduce the inefficient process or avoid repetitive work to create design elements.?

What includes in the Design System??

Values and Design principles?

Before you establish the design system, team alignment is the main factor for successful design system adoption. All teams, including the design, product, marketing, and sales, should have clear and aligned goals and values with the product so that everyone understands the brand objectives.

It is crucial to know clear design principles, such as what the product looks like, What the product is for. So, you document these clear design principles and purposes to provide the right direction for the team, and they will understand what they are creating.?

Component?

The component indicates the UI elements and interfaces such as buttons, CTAs, and checkboxes. It’s often called blocks or groups of elements. It is important to create a set of components with similar functionality. And it should be built by specific behavior functionality. Creating components increases the work productivity of designers and developers, and it prevents repetitive work or duplication of the same interfaces.

Pattern?

The pattern is for more complicated solutions than individual elements. It includes design patterns and product building instructions with the groups of components. When you build the pattern, you focus on solving design problems and business cases. Also, the pattern needs to be documented in the design system to provide clear guidelines for the product team. A pattern has to be reusable and associated with the component.?

Brand Identity and Language?

This part represents overall style guides, including colors, fonts, icons, language(voice, tone), shapes, and company logos. You create documents with all these guidelines and rules (how the team uses the right collaboration of the elements). It will help your teams maintain brand and visual design consistency.?

Documentation?

Once you establish the design system, it is time to have documentation. Documentation indicates overall design system includes all the above elements that we discussed. It includes how design system components work, design principles, use cases for style guides, best practices, etc. It helps the entire team understand the design system and use them correctly.?

Benefits of Design System?

The main benefit of the design system is to increase efficiency. Every team can access the same guideline and has aligned goals. So the design team and product team don’t have to make an effort to create repetitive work. It saves time, energy, and cost, and each can focus on more complex problems and reduce the cost of the entire product development process. A design system also helps consistency. As we discovered above, the design system helps the teams use consistent design patterns, languages, and all other elements based on use cases and style guides. It also delivers a positive user experience. Users can predict your product easily because of visual consistency, and it helps users be familiar with your product quickly.?

Summary?

Keep in mind that the design system is not the same for each organization. You have different values, different objectives, and different design principles. Before jumping into the design system, you need to define what are the biggest problems in your organization and how the design system can help you. Creating a design system is not easy and it requires lots of work. However, it helps your team efficient and productive, and it helps your product provide a better customer experience. If you are ready to adopt a design system,?Tacpoint expert team?can help you establish the tailored design system for your product and your team.

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