5 things to consider for your design system
Design systems are great. They provide a ‘single source of truth’. This means they are a reference point for designers and developers. This helps consistency for your digital products and services.
At WMCA we’ve found that our design system has become indispensable. As we build more products and services, we are saving time because of the design system.
Here are a few of the important things we regularly consider relating to our design system:
1. Is our system usable?
This may sound like a no-brainer, but even design systems need to be designed for usability.
Since the initial release, the WMN Design System has seen a number of changes and improvements to its interface.
We’ve made changes in order to make key information more navigable, changes to make information more understandable and also changes that improve the overall presentation of pages and components.
For a design system to have maximum effect it is important to consider how usable it is. If the users aren’t able to quickly and easily find relevant information then your design system may be more of a nuisance than anything else.
2. Is it helpful?
When maintaining a design system, it’s important to understand who uses it and what they need. We call this user needs.
For example, if you know your design system will be used by developers who prefer a particular coding language or framework, it’s a good idea to consider providing code snippets or out-of-the-box components for those languages and frameworks.
If you know which software your designers are using, you could provide a downloadable grid template.
There are other things you might be able to do to make life easier in the future. You should regularly review your users and their needs. This keeps your design system relevant.
Accessibility is important. Sometimes it is an overlooked issue in design and development.
It can take a lot of time to develop retrospectively. Creating styles, colour palettes and out-of-the-box accessible components for your design system is a great way to improve the consistency of accessibility across your products and services.
The goal of the system should be helping the user make faster and better decisions about how to design or build and it’s in everyone’s best interest to provide to as many helpful tools as possible to do so.
3. Is it worth versioning?
If you haven’t already got it, it’s worth spending time developing a way of providing earlier versions of your design system’s code.
This is important if your design system is used by third-party developers.
Providing older releases ensures that when you make updates, it won’t break any live services.
There are different ways to achieve this. Our versioning system currently uses a combination of NPM, and GitHub/GitHub actions to increment the release versions. You can see our design system releases on GitHub.
When you have a versioning system in place, you will need to decide:
- How many changes trigger a new release
- What kind of changes trigger a new release
You also need to consider when ‘frequent’ releases become ‘too frequent’.
4. Does it cover all of the angles?
Design systems should be updated all the time. This means they are never completely finished: technology changes and user needs emerge.
Design systems should not try to cover every specific user need or document every implementation use case. It’s impossible.
It’s important to find pages you can point users in the right direction when:
- new components are added
- new guidelines are implemented
- new information is documented
You need to iterate your design system. You can do this by:
- Regularly reviewing styles, components and patterns with browser updates
- Revisiting parts of the design system based on user research and emerging user needs
You need to fix issues quickly to help teams who use your design system.
5. What are other smart people doing?
Our design system is inspired by the GOV.UK Design System.
There are also many other organisations who have design systems. Some organisations also publish their user research. This helps to understand why they have made a design or development decision.
You can save time by reading other people’s research before doing your own. After all, third-party is much better than no-party.
Other design systems we like are:
We also recommend reading ‘10 great design systems and how to learn (and steal) from them’.
This article was published as part of #ServicesWeek 2021, a cross-organisational UK public sector event series.
You can also read more of blogs from our team on the WMCA Digital and Data Medium publication.
