Are Design Systems for Me?
Have you already read our story What are Design Systems? If you have, then you’re all set to learn more about the benefits and requirements of Design Systems in this post! Your questions about Design Systems will be answered Rami Ertimo, Design Systems Lead at Intergalactico, Nordcloud Design Studio in Helsinki, Finland.
Who needs Design Systems?
I believe that everyone can benefit from Design Systems and the better design that they produce. Naturally, designers and design functions benefit most, because their work is significantly facilitated by Design Systems. But it doesn’t end there.
Users also benefit through consistent, accessible and concise user interfaces — a better UX! Engineers and developers will praise your component-based designs, and your content creators will enjoy a well-defined Tone of Voice and a clearly communicated content strategy.
Your business will definitely benefit, because once your product teams are freed from UI design they can use the time to solve product specific problems instead. And this means we expect your shareholders to be satisfied with the increasing revenue from happier customers and good customer retention.
Design Systems can dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of design work in organizations which develop multiple products. They are also a powerful accelerator for effective rapid prototyping and lean experimentation, and they don’t compromise the company brand or the quality of their UI.
How expensive is a design system to set up?
I would like to turn this question around. How much does inconsistent UX cost? How much effort will be wasted solving the same design problems over and over again throughout an organization? Have you tried measuring these redundancies?
I promise you Design Systems will cost much less than the sum of all the related activities!
Without a common way of working through a design system, building consistent UX at scale is really difficult. The ROI in saved design effort alone should justify the cost.
Is our product portfolio appropriate for the Design Systems approach?
Yes, I believe everyone can benefit from Design Systems. I think the larger and more complex the organisation, the greater the expected benefit. But as with any behavioural change in an organization, the challenge of fully implementing Design Systems across a whole company is proportional to the company size. For instance, global corporations like IBM have publicly described their difficulties in making one Design System work in their gigantic corporation. But this has not stopped them. Through several iterations, they are building a design philosophy and design guidelines for use across the whole company.
At other end of the spectrum, modern pattern libraries are really light-weight, so even small start-ups can benefit from changing their mindset and thinking about reusing patterns in their products and by building a pattern library.
How do I get started with Design Systems?
Just try it out! You can start really small and expand from there.
Don’t get me wrong but the technology and instruments are the easiest part of Design Systems. You can start with just a single, well-connected person to work on Design Systems, before you have appointed a Design Systems lead or a team. But then you have to get everybody on board and start collaborating. This is a change management challenge. You need to get the organization to understand the value of Design Systems and get them to follow its practices in everyday work and with their designs.
To get it up and running and fully operational, you need to make sure you have well-defined processes and clear roles for the people using, managing, and contributing to your Design System. A Design System is a functional product so it needs dedicated staff, a roadmap, and a backlog. And on the roadmap, you need to consider when and how products are affected, for instance, and define which products use the pattern library. Design Systems are all about doing things in a better way, so of course they involve careful thought!
Get a great head start in using Design Systems and sign up for the Intergalactico hands-on workshops! Read more here:
At Intergalactico we are naturally willing to offer you our expertise and assist your organization on its way to setting up design operations which utilize Design Systems. Just contact us and let’s discuss how we can best help your organization to take advantage of Design Systems.
