5 Reasons How a Design System Can Transform Your Product

Is your product the kind where it has the menu’s location differs from page to page? Or where the CTA buttons have different styling, depending on the actions?

This is certainly no cause for concern. Even the best enterprise products chance upon such issues. The best part is, that it’s totally fixable. All it takes is a full review of the application to spot the anomalies and have them replaced.

But when push comes to shove, you realize that the quick fix you hoped would take about 2 weeks has spiraled into an 8–10 month-long effort. The way this comes to being is that workflows in applications are interconnected — one badly designed interaction has an impact on the others, which casts its shadow on the whole user experience.

Even if you haven’t experienced this particular product scenario, you’re sure to have been a part of a company where the product would always be a work-in-progress or would have multiple issues related to visual inconsistency, or that the designers would have to be given the same briefings over and over again.

It has been already established across multiple studies that good design is a key differentiator and lends a competitive edge to businesses. Good UX design brings consistency to the product experience, which in turn, is a hallmark of credibility. Therefore, one way to ensure that your product provides a consistent and pleasurable experience to its users is by building it on a foundation of design guidelines that can be used across workflows and processes. These design guidelines should enable the product team to take the right approach to creative thinking as well as decision making.

What is a design system?

The NN group defines a design system to be a complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns. It can be termed as a library of reusable components accompanied by clear documentation that can be configured and applied by designers and developers to build digital products.

Pioneers of design-led businesses such as Airbnb, Uber, and IBM have set benchmarks in the way they design digital products by creating a customized collection of repeatable components and a set of standards guiding the use of those components. Indeed, the efforts they invested in creating their design systems have elevated the pace of their output and innovation.

5 reasons to invest in a design system

Design systems, when implemented well, can provide a lot of benefits to a company:

Ensuring quality and consistent experiences

Having a design system in place ensures a unified language in every situation. It reduces the time required for design and development by leaving minimal to no scope for miscommunications as it is a single source of truth that manages brand and UX components, coded elements, detailed documentation, and more so teams can stay in sync.

Speeding up the design process

Enabling quick decision-making is a great advantage that comes with having a design system in place. The ready-to-use UI kit and style guide enable the design team to create as well as replicate designs quickly. The elements in these are designed to be reused repeatedly, thus saving the need to start from scratch and risk unintended inconsistency. With the same colors, fonts, and input elements being implemented, it’s easier for the developers to create a unified code to be used multiple times, thus saving time on development as well.

Bringing visual consistency

Enterprises often have their teams work in silos, with each product or channel functioning independently of the others. This leads to the creation of fragmented and inconsistent experiences. However, a design system being a single source of components, patterns, and styles can unify disjointed experiences to become visually cohesive across the product. In the long term, the design system can manage any visual rebrands or redesigns at scale.

Encouraging collaboration

A design system is essentially a centralized design repository comprising extensive guidelines for all participants in the product team, be it designers, developers, or product managers. Therefore, any new person joining the team can easily reference this asset in their work, ensuring consistency across timelines. By investing in a design system, you’re also working on enhancing cross-departmental collaboration, and alignment across your organization, along with a heightened understanding of your own brand.

Efficiency in development

With a complete design system in place, developers can be more efficient in their work since they no longer waste time looking for the right component. They also don’t have to start from scratch every time they have to create a code. With a design system in place, the bulk of the code is ready and developers get to focus their energies on enhancing the product or shipping quicker updates.

The biggest benefit that comes with a design system is that it does away with the mundane, repetitive tasks for both, designers and developers. It instead allows them to focus on creating novel ideas to enhance the product.

To know more about how a design system can benefit your product, download our free guide, Everything You Need to Know About Design Systems. This guide has all the details regarding the components of a design system and the benefits it can bring to your business. Additionally, it also advises you whether a design system is the right fit for your business and product and gives you alternatives to elevate your product experience.