Why Building Design Library is very important for your Startup
Agility is one of several keys in startup success story. When building a startup, you have to be very fast, especially when building your product or prototype, validating the ideas, giving response to customer feedback and so on.
Product Design is the face of your startup in customer’s perspective. They will decide to “take it” or “leave it” when seeing and using your product. The best way to build the best product design is to build based on your customer voice. There is so many forms of customer voice, such as direct feedback, customer behavior, transaction data, etc. Executing product development plan in an agile way based on the customer voice can give you a great competitive advantage.
The product design problems that i found based on my experiences in corporate, startup and side-job is almost same. We did little things over and over again in 80% of our time, and important things just in 20% of the rest. We are busy with design bugs, design standard and inconsistency rather than focusing on more important things such as reducing customer painful point, giving better product experience, researching new trend that give “WOW” effect for our customer and many others. I totally agree that we should be perfect at the basic (no design bugs, consistent design, best practice experience, etc), but how we can make it with minimum efforts? Here is the answer.
Design Library
Design Library is a set of Design Component that can be reused by our design and front-end development team when building a product or prototype.
- Design Library will make your design consistent. All product designers can get the centralized library as a source to build their flow, user interface and front-end code. We can define our consistency rules and set the limit & flexibility on it.
- You can deliver your prototype & product fast. With a complete design library, your designer just have to do “Drag & Drop” or “Copy Paste” component, rather than building it from scratch. It can improve the design & prototyping process up to 80% based on my experiences.
- Better performance with minimum design bugs. Good design library will be improved regularly and have several version upgrade based on bugs, performance issue or other improvement that found by our team. With this mechanism, we can minimize repeated errors and enhance its performance.
Design Library itself is a part of Design System and have a broad discussion. Many large startups & companies already have a great Design System that support their business. Here is several awesome Design System that i learned from.
Conclusion
Design Library can give a large impact in your product development process, especially for product design phase. Faster product design can help you build better product based on customer voice in an agile way. Your Product Design team can be more focus on customer voice rather than several basic design problems.
Stevanus Christopel is a Senior Front End Developer for Design System of Tokopedia (Indonesia startup). He had several experience in building a startup, working on large corporate (Astra Group) and doing several side-job for product development project.
