Everything is a Design System
I work at a large and growing company. We have a startup mentality, but a fairly mature product. We don’t tell startup stories about “boosting landing page conversion by 300%.” We make small, incremental improvements and measure them over time. Our systems aren’t broken, they’re pretty smooth already. We work on expanding their reach and power, while smoothing out any rough edges we find.
So, design in our company is really about creating systems. Designing one email or landing page is not an effective use of time. We need design frameworks that can be easily and quickly extended and adapted to new situations — without having to go back to the drawing board every time.
Many UI designers don’t get this. They want to be focused on ideating and greenfielding — every design must fuel their unbridled creative juices — that’s how they define being productive. But let’s be honest, this is not the best way to provide value. One-off designs are sometimes necessary and the proper deliverable, but most of the time, they aren’t.
Most of the time, we know that we’re going to be repeating this work often, and what we need is a system that provides consistency while allowing room to change and grow as requirements evolve.
Very rarely will a project evolve into something as complex and rigorous as a Bootstrap or Foundation. But we try to think about our projects as a collection of reusable components, and build to suit.
To be honest, it’s hard. We’re often arguing during pair sessions about just how reusable a component should be. There are upfront costs to working this way, but even a little bit of investment tends to pay off down the road.
You can’t predict the future, and there’s no point in spending time getting it “just right”. But you can build small, modular components that are easier to adapt and reuse. This is where standards and definitions come from, and it speeds up development immensely, while providing a more stable design framework for communicating with users, and ultimately a more successful and satisfactory product.
Originally published at medium.com on November 28, 2016.
