The design system: “Nice to have” does not work anymore

Design system is no longer a luxury, but now forms the basics in modern product development. As practice has shown, the statement "only designers need a design system" is quite far from reality.?

From the outside, a design system is just a collection of systematic components and perfectly aligned pixels. But from the inside, a design system is a product within a product that has its own business goals, priorities, KPIs and users. It’s a product that a whole team is working on and which helps to achieve business goals faster.

We strongly believe that a design system is not the sweet bonus that we offer to our clients. Instead, the design system is the core, part of the architecture and the framework that completely changes the approach to the development of complex systems and products.

Managers and leaders in the organizations should therefore think of a design system as the glue to help teams in meeting growing demands of delivery with high pace and efficiency.

“Design system principle #1: Systems solve the easy problems so products can solve hard problems more easily.”

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Nathan Curtis, founder of EightShapes?

So why do you need it?

Design systems are built not only to organize existing components, but provide much wider benefits to the business:?

• Shorter time to market at scale. With reusable UI components, teams can replicate the same elements for different purposes without a need to create custom designs every time. Reusable components also help to manage technical debt better, with faster time to update the component once if required.?
• Visual consistency of complex products. When it comes to high brand differentiation, many custom variations of UI elements used in different places prevent the organizations from achieving this goal. Design systems help to bring cohesive product design in multiple instances of the website or app, which also helps support a faster learning curve for new users.
• Standard scalable ways of working for cross-functional teams. Instead of being a wild collection of components and code, a good design system is a long-term investment to scale product development. It becomes even more important at the enterprise level, where you have large distributed teams working online across multiple geographies. In a popular engineering journey from monolith to microservices, design systems also help to bring required governance, as they can be used as the guideline and common standard for different feature teams.
• Unlocked design capacity for more strategic work. Rather than focusing on tweaking the elements for different designs, product teams can focus more on improving user journeys, optimization of workflows, etc. If treated properly, design systems support the ability to streamline work and tackle complex UX problems.
• Easy onboarding of new team members. Good design systems help in easy onboarding of newcomers, as they act as an educational tool with a lower risk of making mistakes.

How can you get started?

Digital products are built by teams. So are the design systems. Usually, the champions of creating the design system are designers tired from solving the same problems and developers frustrated with custom styles for every component. Messy designs and codebase push them into the world of inefficient and exhausting collaboration.?

Sometimes they start organizing the things while working on the main features. But to make a real difference, a design system can not be treated as a side project and requires a dedicated investment. It is also very important to get organizational sponsorship from the leadership team, in order to make a design system a real initiative.

In our experience, the optimal design systems team is multidisciplinary and independent, so that it can serve several squads making digital products. The design system team therefore behaves like a product being consumed by products.

As practice has shown, the team should include at least 2 UX Designers, 1 UI Designer, 1-2 FE Engineers, a Scrum Master and QA. But for complex platforms and a mix of using different applications, more senior engineering work, as well as research work would definitely be required. Ideally, the team should also include a content writer, especially when dealing with multinational platforms supporting different languages.

A well-made design system is a visual language that everyone can understand. When everyone in the team can speak the same language, the product is more consistent and goes into production faster.

Our clients, for whom we have developed products based on an approach with a design system, have already noticed a huge leap in the quality and growth rate of their business, which leaves their competitors far behind.