Why Your Team Needs a Design System
Most of us have interacted with products that aim to reduce the number of routine decisions we are required to make so that efforts can be concentrated on a few high-quality decisions. In daily life this could be similar to New York City transit-goers leveraging Unimark’s fabled, “New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual,” or professionally thinking of systems, structures, and tools put in place to remove stressful decisions or friction points.
💡 The goal of a design system is exactly that, to reduce the number of routine design decisions one must make in order to focus on complex problems facing users.💡
The Problems
We’ve likely all heard, or even experienced in person, the horror stories of design getting out of control inside of an organization. One example commonly shared is Hubspot having over 100 shades of gray, 40+ text styles in 3 different fonts, 16 different modals, and 5 ways to filter a table. This happens more often than some may like to admit or realize.
Most of these self-inflicted wounds stem from organizations aiming to maximize output in a given set of time and constraints. Innovation, collaboration, iteration, agile, … the list goes on for words teams use in order to explain how they’re moving fast to solve user needs. The unfortunate reality is that teams are looking to innovate on products before they take a step back to first assess how they are approaching them — insert the aforementioned wide array of grays, modals, filters, fonts, etc.
Design Systems Curb this Trend and Others
Leveraging a design system provides significant benefits to an organization and team. At a high level, design systems enable your team to:
- Become More Efficient
- Improve Design Consistency
- Scale
- Ensure Accessibility
- Solve Complex Problems
- Shift from Outputs to Outcomes
- … and many others
Ask any designer, design leader, or design team if they want to become any of the above — I’m sure the answer is yes.
Efficiency: while a designer may like the challenge of reimagining a digital form, it’s a much better usage of time to leverage existing form components provided in a design system and tackle the harder outcome — how do we increase conversion on our form. Individuals and teams will become more efficient when routine design decisions are solved in a singular system.
Consistency: design systems come with extensive documentation, principles, and rules for the components. Slot components, auto-layout, and smart variants can be leveraged to gain total flexibility without breaking components across instances.
Accessibility: WCAG 2.1 compliant text and background color combinations are provided out of the box in design systems. This instant leg up is incredibly important within financial institutions and is becoming more important across all digital experiences (take Domino’s for instance).
Scale / Complex Problems: when a team is able to efficiently deliver beautiful, consistent, and accessible designs to a team, they are able to scale the products and problems they’re working on. The team’s focus will shift from being solely on the outputs delivered, but now also on the outcomes, a company is moving towards (e.g. OKRs or KPIs).
Final Thoughts
Creativity is not needed in everything a designer or design team takes on. Design systems exist to increase a team’s output, consistency, accessibility, and scale. Getting everyone on the same page with regard to design systems is difficult, but a conversation worth having.
We’ve been hard at work creating a design system that aims to deliver all the value props mentioned above. If you’re on the edge, check out the previews in Orchestra’s Figma design system here. We will also be diving into other areas in coming articles such as design systems inside a product org, with agile, and others.
