By: John Lee Hagen
In the last blog post about design systems and the Design System Masterclass by Brad Frost, I focused on the doing part and the definition of design systems, how to work with them, and how to govern them — the Design System Ecosystem. But the remaining questions are: What are the benefits of using design systems? How can we measure their ROI? Is design scalable? In this blog post, I will try to provide some answers.
The benefits of using design systems were best summed up by Brad Frost in his masterclass:
- Promoting Ul consistency & cohesion = happier users and product success
- Faster production = roll out more features and iterations faster than ever
- Higher-quality production = teams can focus on higher-level tasks
- Easier testing = more responsive, performant, and accessible experiences
- Shared vocabulary = more time collaborating and less time in meetings
- Useful reference = an essential resource and hub for best practices
- Future-friendly foundation = modify, extend, and improve upon over time
Furthermore, since the Atomic Design mental model is also bridging the gap between development and design and hence sharing a standardized API Design which Brad Frost summarizes in the following benefits:
- More efficient development and design: Users, developers, and designers can spend more time coding rather than reading API documentation. Library contributors don’t have to think as much about component API naming.
- Shared vocabulary: Designers and developers can spend more time collaborating rather than obsessing over what things are named. Bonus: This brings design tools and code in closer sync to anticipate future tooling synchronization.
- Easy future changes: Future API changes and improvements are as easy as find-and-replace.
The benefits of design systems are one side of the medal. The other side: Do the benefits justify creating a design system? What is the Return on Investment (ROI)? Is a calculation of the monetary value of an investment versus its cost for a design system even possible?
To answer this question I’d like to refer to the Design System Efficiency Curve from Ben Callahan:
In the beginning, working without one might be faster — but over time this will shift and — as mentioned above — the benefits do apply most often in changes, adaptions, or a rebranding of parts or even the whole design system.
As Callahan’s curve suggests: How long does it take for a design system to add to your productivity rather than stalling it?
An interesting article from Smashing Magazine shows their approach to actually calculating the ROI of a design system with their formula and how you could also approach it:
So, to conclude, is a Design System scalable? The biggest value of a design system is only achieved if the company follows the aimed approach and consistency stays intact over time.
The efficiency curve as well as the ROI calculator only applies to the best-case scenario.
As the authors from Smashing Magazine say about the Y variable: “Y denotes the percentage of time invested in ongoing maintenance after the ramp-up phase. In our specific case, we assumed 0.5X, but essentially, Y could be anything.” (Source: Smashing Magazine).
