The Best Design System: An Android Resource Foundation & How to Prove It’s Actually Worth It
Here at BestSecret, we’re all about a scalable user experience with a minimum of technical and design debt. Therefore, we’re busy establishing and growing our Best Design System — and we love to write about it.
Recently, our engineer Víctor Espejo has reflected on how we can create a resource architecture on Android as a foundation for the design system, in terms of a preCompose approach:
Design System foundations: an Android resource architecture before Compose
In this article, we pass through various Android tools, step by step, in order to go from a hardcoded UI to a more structured one. It explains some ideas with the aim that the reader select, or create, his own way of preserve app ui consistency the easiest way.
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However, technical foundations are only one third of the story, the other two being the design side and the business side. And while we, unfortunately, don’t have an article for you (yet) on how exactly we compose the Best Design System in Figma, our designers Guido Baena Wehrmann and Max Speicher have put some serious effort into calculating that the whole exercise is actually worthwhile. Even better, they’ve developed a general formula that’s more or less applicable to any design system, and they’ve made it public for anyone to use:
One Formula To Rule Them All: The ROI Of A Design System
TL;DR: Based on our experience with working on establishing a design system at BestSecret Group, we have developed a general formula to calculate the ROI and prove the value of design systems. The formula has only three parameters: upfront investment, maintenance effort, and anticipated productivity gains (spoiler: there’s benchmarks for this). Also, we provide a ready-to-use spreadsheet.
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We’ve already taken significant steps into establishing the Best Design System at BestSecret — on the technical, design, and business sides. Yet, this is really only the beginning. So, please, stay tuned for more articles and invaluable insights from our engineering and design teams.
