A cautionary tale of lacking a design system
Design Systems are end-to-end solutions for managing uniform designs at scale by using reusable assets e.g. components and patterns. It pays off having a design system but creating one is not an easy task. You’ll have to face a lot of hurdles that are very human oriented and organizationally challenging. Many well-known companies implemented their design systems into their organizational fabric.
Design Systems are end-to-end solutions for managing uniform designs at scale by using reusable assets e.g. components and patterns. It pays off having a design system but creating one is not an easy task. You’ll have to face a lot of hurdles that are very human oriented and organizationally challenging. Many well-known companies implemented their design systems into their organizational fabric.
Intro
When you work on multiple software products and each of your products looks like it came from a different company, you may have some consistency and optimization problems. Some big tech companies have dozens of products that come out from their production line with the same user experience, look, feel, and usability while building the UI of these apps at a blazingly fast pace. How do they do it? The answer lies in leveraging a design system.
What is a design system? Another definition of design system…? Nope!
Design system is a collection of guidelines and reusable assets for designing and developing beautiful interfaces with minimal effort from the development side. That’s as succinct as I can get, defining what it is and without giving you another marketing slick you can find by googling “design system”. What I would like to focus on in this article is my experience of seeing how a design system was surfacing in one of the companies I worked for.
As a disclaimer, I didn’t actively participate in contributing to the development of the design system. I was leading my own documentation project from “zero to hero’’ at the time so I didn’t want to have more problems to solve as there were more than enough. However, I’m a curious individual and I did want to learn more about the project my colleagues were working on. So, I observed the growth of the fledgling design system from a very comfortable vantage point — I had no responsibility and could satiate my curiosity by attending meetings, accessing presentations, wikis, and repositories. Despite my passive engagement into the design system, I collected a whole lot of insight I would like to share with others.
The company I worked for was big, period. There were 100s of software products that all looked different and each had their own user experience. If you compared two or more products from that company, you would never guess that they come from the same brand. You could ask “so what?” and shrug it off as something insignificant. However, for software makers being efficient is really important since time means money in this regard. Imagine building a user interface for each application separately… Doesn’t it seem like too much work and a lot of hassle? Well, it is indeed. That’s why my colleagues led the efforts of building the design system. The advantages of having the design system would span across the whole company expediting the development work for software developers, having established design principles for UI/UX designers, and writing guidelines for technical writers, to mention a few profits. That’s the holy grail of the undertaking and indisputably having the design system is exorbitantly profitable. However, the amount of effort that comes with creating the design system constitutes a Herculean task and is even more difficult when a big company with multiple software products attempts to create one.
The road to the design system
In an ideal world, the head of the company would initiate the work on the design system in a top-down manner. There would be a global, well-resourced team dedicated to that end goal. However, in a less ideal world, the initiative comes from the bottom-up approach. There’s a group of individuals who start a project on the design system as their side hustle on top of their core responsibilities. As you can deduce, this group is usually under-resourced for such a megatask.
In a company I worked for, there were 10 000s of employees and the group in one of the company’s many business units I was assigned to was mostly UXers. So, we had an imbalanced ratio of dominating UX designers vs software developers. Another problem my colleagues faced was the siloed environment that each unit operated in. Each group assigned to their project had their own way of doing things. It turned out that another group was also in the trenches of creating a design system. So, bringing all these groups together and convincing them to work on one design system was the first hurdle to cross.
Bias should be people’s second name
After that first obstacle, there were meetings… and then more meetings. Bias should be people’s second name. What I mean by that is the fact that people all agreed on the way a particular component should look and behave as long as it looked and behaved the way they wanted.
Every now and then, the meetings looked like discussions of two opposing parties in a Parliament because of varying opinions. What usually lacks in these kinds of meetings is a healthy foundation of scientific approach. Oftentimes, the meetings were concluded with no decision, and the next meeting was back to square one.
Examples of design systems
Nevertheless, once you overcome all the above-mentioned obstacles, you can reap the benefits of leveraging the design system.
There’s many big and small companies that successfully created and implemented design systems. Google spent $2.4 billion to create its Material Design and you can see that it’s an important product for Google featured in their Google I/O ‘21.
Adobe devised Spectrum
IBM came up with Carbon
Atlasian created Atlassian Design System
Shopify made Polaris
And here you can find a long list of design systems.
Conclusion
A path to a design system is full of stumbling blocks but once you overcome these obstacles, a whole lot of rewards await you. However, bear in mind that the design system is never finished, it is an organic product that evolves over time as new trends set in and technology develops. The design system may be the cave you fear to enter that holds the treasure you seek.
