Is a Design System a Must-Have for Business Growth?
Creating a coherent design identity is one of the most significant challenges faced by organizations. Sometimes, the user experience differs when comparing two products from the same company. These inconsistencies can affect your brand identity.
What is a design system?
A design system creates visual consistency across all your pages, channels, and products. It is a streamlined machine built with optical components, technology, and industry specifications. Design systems use procedures that impact how engineers, product managers, designers, and branding professionals work together.
Design systems are not a novel concept as such. They were around in guidelines and patterns when responsive web design existed. However, they were less extensive and structured than they are now.
A design system consists of two components:
- Design Repository
- Design-system team
The design system repository is the central location with all the visual components, a pattern library, and a style guide.
Style guide: Whether you’re producing a white paper, a product description, an app, or a website page, a style guide is your reference for vocabulary and writing style.
Example: Microsoft’s style guide contains everything you’d need to write about their products/services.
“Today, lots of people are called upon to write about technology. We need a simple, straightforward style guide that everyone can use, regardless of their role. And it needs to reflect Microsoft’s modern approach to voice and style: warm and relaxed, crisp and clear, and ready to lend a hand.” — Microsoft Style Guide
Visual components:
Also known as a component library or design library, this part of a design system contains standard reusable visual elements. It takes a lot of time and effort to create a component library.
Along with the elements, a visual component library also contains the following:
- Component name
- Description
- Characteristics
- State
- Code snippets
- Front-end and back-end frameworks
Pattern library:
The component library is sometimes confused with the pattern library. They are two different elements of the design repository. A pattern library contains content layouts and sets of UI element groups. It is a template library that utilizes components from the component library.
Design-system team:
A design system’s effectiveness depends on the managing team. The structure of this team could vary based on the type and size of the organization. Design systems need ongoing oversight and maintenance to make sure they are up-to-date.
However, it contains at least three members: a visual designer, an interaction designer, and a developer.
Why should you use a design system?
A design system can significantly help an organization if built and used correctly. Here’s how.
Faster time-to-market
The digital world moves fast. A relevant product today might not be appropriate in a few years. Designing and launching products repeatedly could be extremely daunting if done from scratch.
Having a design system in place can help you significantly reduce the time to market, giving you an edge over your competition.
Improved UX quality
The visual elements that comprise your design system are the heart and soul of your brand. Having a standardized set of features only improves the user experience.
Enhanced collaboration
One of the primary purposes of design systems is to establish and accelerate effective collaboration despite the team size. As Helen Keller once said, “Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” Not having a design system leaves your team members with no choice but to rely on manual support and a lot of back and forth for minor tasks. It creates a unique and shared language and guides a systematic product creation with little to no friction.
Reduced costs and fewer errors
Enhanced and fast-tracked product delivery translates directly into a reduced requirement of time and resources, and design systems help you achieve just that. Pre-prepared frameworks comprising a design system are also responsible for minimizing human error by providing direct templates for the product parts.
Rapid replication and production at scale
Although creating a design system is tedious and time-consuming, it allows you to achieve more by doing less at the end of the day. Your initial effort will enable you to replicate the previous frameworks within minutes and create new products at scale.
Allows you to focus on more complex problems
Since your team will have all the visual elements in place, they’ll be able to focus more on complex problems rather than creating design elements from scratch. They can work on value-driven activities while the design system automates manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks.
Creates unified language across teams
Now, having a design system in place gives your team members a clear indication of what needs to be done, saving you time, money, and resources. As your team expands across functionalities and geographies, it is natural to expect miscommunication and conflict. This also increases the chances of a lot of design being wasted since it has to go through multiple rounds of approval across the team.
Works as an educational tool for junior designers
As an expanding team, you must spend considerable time training new hires and interns. Having a design system helps you give them an excellent onboarding experience and a great learning tool. Additionally, a design system allows you onboard freelancers and contractors with ease.
Reduces design and development debt
Design debt is all user experience and design process flaws that develop over time because of innovation, expansion, and a lack of design refactoring. We use more touchpoints to interact with our customers than before. As we move faster to cover all the touch points in a buying journey, we might need more consistency, creating a design with development debt. Having a design system in place helps you avoid that.
Helps you create a vivid, memorable brand
Rather than limiting the brand to rules, a design system creates a liberating environment for the brand identity. It enhances the overall appearance of your brand by collating every visual element and communicating a strong, consistent visual image. It creates a consistent front end and increases the recall value of your brand.
Also Read About: Top 5 Design System Companies
