When consistency goes wrong: how design systems make learnability harder

Design systems are great, but don’t forget your site’s content! Photo by Balázs Kétyi on Unsplash

Repeat after me: no one intentionally creates unusable websites or apps.

We all encounter unusable websites and apps every day. So how does this happen all the time?

There are a lot of answers to this, but a big one is rooted in design systems and a fundamental misunderstanding of consistency.

If you are a designer, you’ve had it drummed into your head that consistency is your overall goal, that things need to look the same throughout an experience. And while this goal is indeed a noble one, and that we all mean well, we tend to go about consistency all wrong.

We all use design systems to make our lives, and the lives of the developers we work with, easier. However, when we talk about consistency, we usually are referring to the elements in a design system: the buttons, the cards, the tables, and all of the other visual elements we use every day. This is where consistency goes wrong, not for development teams, but later on for users who get confused on where to go once our experiences are launched into the wild.

To see our experiences from a customer’s perspective, we need to dig into their existing mental models. We have to assume that our customers are, 99.9% of the time, are in physical and digital experiences that we…