Can Product Designers be “Design System Designers”?

In organisations where the Design System is built in-house but has low maturity, it’s not uncommon for the Product designers working on digital products of the organisation to be the ones building the Design System.

On the other hand, in larger design teams, where the Design System is more mature and established, there will very likely be a Design System-dedicated team.

Why are these nuances relevant, and why am I starting to describe the differences between Design System designers and Product designers from these ideas? Because the fact that there are Product designers creating Design Systems makes it seem that Product designers and Design System designers are just the same. And this is not quite true.

Product Design vs. Design Systems

Let’s start by clarifying the differences in the two disciplines:

1. Product Design: Product Design involves determining what to offer and how to best meet customer demands. It focuses on the creation of individual products, considering user needs, functionality, and user experience.
2. Design Systems: Design Systems are comprehensive sets of standards used to manage design at scale. They consist of reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that ensure consistency and efficiency in design across products.

While Product Design is about creating specific products, Design Systems are about establishing a framework for consistent design across multiple products or platforms.

By definition, there’s a clear difference between Product Design and Design Systems, despite their similarities. In detail:

Summary of the differences between Product Design and Design Systems

Product Design and Design Systems are both integral elements within the broader field of design, but they serve different purposes and address distinct aspects of the design process.

Given the differences in these two disciplines, the role of the Product designer will differ from the role of the Design System designer.

The differences in the roles of the Product Designer and the Design System Designer

Expanding on the distinction between Product designers and Design System designers involves delving deeper into the complexity of their roles, the nuances of their daily tasks, and the broader impact of their work within an organisation.

Product Designers

The range of responsibilities

• User-Centred Design Process: Product designers are heavily invested in the user-centred design process. This involves extensive user research, creating user personas, mapping out user journeys, and constantly iterating designs based on user feedback. Their objective is to solve real problems for real users, making empathy a crucial skill.
• Prototyping and Validation: They spend a significant amount of time prototyping various design solutions at different fidelity levels — from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity interactive prototypes. These prototypes are then used in usability testing sessions to validate hypothesis and design decisions with actual users, ensuring the final product is both usable and desirable.
• Visual and Interaction Design: Beyond just making products usable, Product designers also focus on making them visually appealing (UI design) and ensuring a smooth interactive experience (UX design), so that users not only can use the product but also enjoy using it. This requires a keen eye for visual design principles and an understanding of HCI.
• Cross-disciplinary Collaboration: They work closely with engineers, product managers, marketers, and possibly customer support teams, facilitating a shared understanding of user needs and ensuring that the solution fits within technical capabilities and business strategies.

Impact on the product they design

Product designers directly influence the user’s interaction with the product, impacting user satisfaction, engagement, and ultimately, the success of the product in the market. They face challenges like balancing user needs with business goals, designing for various user segments, and ensuring accessibility and inclusivity.

Design System Designer

The range of responsibilities

• System Thinking: Design System designers apply principles of system thinking to create scalable and reusable design solutions. They’re not just designing components in isolation but are considering how all the components can work together within and across products and platforms.
• Component Design and Documentation: A significant part of their role is to design the UI components and document them thoroughly. This documentation includes not only visual specifications (size, colour, typography) but also behavioural specifications (states, interactions, animations) and code guidelines for implementation.
• Maintaining and Evolving the Design System: The digital world is constantly evolving, so Design System designers must ensure that the Design System adapts and grows. This involves adding new components, deprecating outdated ones, and ensuring the system remains efficient and relevant.
• Advocacy and Education: Successfully implementing a Design System requires buy-in from various stakeholders within the organisation. Design System designers often find themselves educating others about the Design System, demonstrating its value, and training designers and developers on how to use it effectively.

Impact on the products they serve

Design System designers work on a meta-level, affecting the Product Design process across the entire organisation. Their work leads to increased design and development efficiency, improved consistency across products, and easier collaboration between teams. Their challenges often include managing the Design System’s growth to prevent bloat, ensuring adoption across the organisation, and keeping the system up-to-date with the most relevant design and technology standards.

The overlaps in the roles

Despite the distinct responsibilities and focus areas of Product designers and Design System designers, there are several overlaps in their roles, illustrating how interconnected these positions are within the ecosystem of product development. These overlaps often manifest in skills, methodologies, and objectives that both roles share to some extent:

Shared Focus on User Experience

Both roles have a deep commitment to enhancing the user experience (UX). Product designers directly shape the UX through their design decisions for specific products, while Design System designers influence the UX indirectly by providing the tools and guidelines that ensure consistency and usability across products. That is, of course, when considering the end users. Let’s not forget that the users of the Design System are the Product designers and engineers, and their UX is also considered by the Design System designer.

Design Principles and Best Practices

Both types of designers rely on a foundational understanding of design principles and best practices. This includes knowledge of colour theory, typography, layout, and interaction design principles that ensure the creation of appealing and functionally effective designs.

Collaboration and Communication

Collaboration with other team members, such as developers, product managers, and other designers, is crucial for both roles. Effective communication skills are necessary to advocate for design decisions, provide feedback, and ensure that design intentions are accurately implemented.

Prototyping and Testing

Both Product designers and Design System designers use prototyping tools to communicate design ideas and test them. Prototyping for a Product designer might focus on user flows and interactions within a specific product, while a Design System designer might prototype to test the flexibility and applicability of design components in various contexts.

Iteration and User Feedback

Iteration based on user feedback and data is a common process for both roles. Product designers iterate on product designs to better meet user needs, while Design System designers might iterate on components and guidelines to ensure they remain relevant and effective across different products and emerging business needs.

Attention to Accessibility and Inclusivity

Ensuring that designs are accessible and inclusive is a shared responsibility. Both roles need to consider a wide range of users and ensure that the products or components they design can be used by as many people as possible.

Use of Design and Prototyping Tools

Both roles require proficiency in design and prototyping tools, such as Figma and Sketch. These tools are used to create designs, build prototypes, and collaborate with team members.

Advocacy for Design Consistency

While Design System designers are directly responsible for creating the standards that ensure design consistency, Product designers also advocate for consistency in their work by adhering to these Design Systems and sometimes contributing to their evolution.

Documentation

Documentation is essential for both roles but in slightly different contexts. Product designers may document user flows, design decisions, and user research findings, whereas Design System designers focus on documenting Design System guidelines, component usage, and best practices.

Final thoughts

While both roles deliver designs, in one way or another, their focuses and processes are clearly distinct.

Having a Product designer create a Design System can be risky, given the required systems thinking approach to create a component that is built in such a way that it responds consistently to existing user needs and has enough flexibility to be scalable for future cases.

The opposite is also applicable; having a Design System designer create a product for the end user may not go as well as expected since Design System designers care less for the visual appeal of what they build and focus more on the rules and guidelines that will allow what they’re designing to address user needs, provide guidance for the engineers who’ll implement it, and be scalable for eventual future needs.

Product designers will focus on creating delightful and functional user experiences for specific products, while, in contrast, Design System designers invest in the infrastructure that enables consistent and efficient design across an organisation’s entire product line.

Nonetheless, both roles are crucial in delivering high-quality digital products and experiences.