Recap: Business and Design: Leveraging design systems
A Figma Africa Meetup balancing business and design in today’s tech companies.
In the first Design and Business, we discussed “Finding the convergence”.
Our speakers, Sanusi Ismaila, a Tech consultant and the CEO of Colab Hub in Kaduna State, and Feranmi Ajetunmobi, are the brand storyteller of Cowrywise in Lagos State. You can read the full recap here
We knew from the beginning of the first meetup that When you solve a problem that makes the users and other stakeholders happy, you have created value for the business and yourself (the designer). So we decided to take it a step further with a discussion on how to leverage design systems.
What is a design system?
According to CSS tricks, everything that makes up your products — “From typography, layouts and grids, colors, icons, components, and coding conventions, to voice and tone, style-guides and documentation,” a design system is bringing all of these together in a way that allows your entire team to learn, build and grow”.
Purest Agada ( UI designer at CoLab Innovation Hub Kaduna ) our first speaker defined design systems as “A a collection of reusable components, guidelines, assets and kits that are relevant to a business (Product). The purpose is to help business team learn, build faster and grow.”
The speaker went ahead to say whether your company is large or small, designing digital products and delivering great user experiences is always challenging. Uniting designers and product teams to work smoothly take great effort, and as a result, a lot of businesses struggle to deliver products time, with great aesthetics, well-integrated and consistent user experiences. Scaling up becomes hard if such challenges are not solved, almost 60% of businesses reported that improving consistency was their biggest UX challenge.
To add to that, the speaker showed examples of design systems to mention a few Polaris by Shopify, Carbon by Ibm, material design by google, and how they improve small and large businesses with well-documented design styles and guides to enable faster development and consistency. He pointed out what Nathan Curtis calls these systems — “A design system isn’t a project. It’s a product serving other products.”
Furthermore, the speaker highlighted how businesses can save money and time since the processing of mocking up designs, defining and rewriting UI components and code all add up to the product design cost and time.
In my opinion, efficiency and removal of redundant processes are core parts of design systems. It will only be wise to leverage these systems until such a business has the skill and resources to create one for itself.
While using a design system, businesses can easily manage consistency on all their platforms, redefine design style that creates a better experience for the users, improves productivity, create a better platform to work with business partners, makes it easier for the design team to work remotely, save cost and time during designs.
Adding new team members also becomes easy since the system contains structured documentation of the brand identity of the business, new designers can easily start speaking the design language of the business by studying the design guide.
After seeing examples of existing design systems the hands-on session led by kwatmi Haruna Paul. The participant chose Google material design, using figma as the prototyping to practically use a design system and work on something simple. An app that provides useful information, tips from health professionals around the world, access to health care facilities, and current demographics of Covid19.
Some of the participants especially beginners we excited about the outcome of the meetup. They were able to learn and practically use a design system, one of the participants also expressed how easy it was to understand and use the design system. In general, the meetup was fun and practical.
“The Figma Africa Kaduna team plans to keep the conversation going and we have another meetup in the works. Keep your eyes peeled for updates.” Mudia Imasuen
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