Auditing design system health with time and a spreadsheet
“The best tool available today for exploring real-life questions of quantity and change is the spreadsheet.” — Bret Victor, “Kill Math”
There are many reasons and ways to audit a design system.
The most frequent is probably auditing the suite of products you have and looking for uses of various component types (buttons, dropdowns, checkboxes) to work out where the biggest component needs in your organization are so that you can prioritize accordingly.
Another is taking an existing design system, and checking it for quality, consistency, and general system health. This is the type I’ll focus on today.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to work in companies with dedicated design system teams. Often you’re just bootstrapping something that solves some of your problems until a critical mass is reached and you can secure some internal investment.
You may not have well-honed metrics or analytics for measuring the health of your system yet. You’ll probably be relying on internal surveys, and good spreadsheet or two.
Story time
It was late 2019, and version 1 of Onfido’s design system had been in place for around a year. The system’s initial creation was a mix of learnings from high-profile…
