05.09.2022
What is a design system?
Whether Google, SAP, Airbnb or Spotify – all the big players have their own design system. We’ll show you what’s behind the hype buzzword and how your company can benefit from a design system.
Why is everyone talking about design systems now? The digital transformation is also changing product development: it is becoming more modular, more responsive and more collaborative. Products and services are no longer individual applications. They are a multitude of digital touchpoints – on many platforms and devices. They are merging into huge digital ecosystems. In order to develop this, product management, design, front-end and back-end development, marketing and sales must work closely together in projects. This results in a variety of challenges for stakeholders:
- Developers want to create new products and features without repeating the same discussions and the same work over and over again for different products and media.
- Product owners need to bring their products to market faster and better.
- Marketing wants customers to be able to experience the brand consistently – regardless of which channel or device they use.
- Designers want to make design accessible to all teams and ensure that everyone adheres to the defined design guidelines and principles.
- From the company’ s perspective, product development must become more efficient and brand awareness must improve.
Design systems are your solution to all these challenges. With them, you can tackle the complexity of the digital world.
Definition of a design system
A design system is a tool with which design and development can jointly implement products with higher quality and less effort. As a single source of truth, it comprises all the elements that make up the design of a brand and that the project team needs to create digital products. A design system is therefore a framework with clear guidelines, principles and reusable components. Google’s Material Design is one of the best-known examples of a design system.
Components of a design system
In detail, a design system consists of the following elements:
- Design principles , for example on accessibility, information architecture or motion design, lay the common foundation for all those involved in the project.
- A style guide documents the branding of a company: How does the brand feel? How is it represented on different media? What language is used for the content? A style guide regulates how graphic design elements such as logos, colors, grids, icons, typography, etc. look and how they are used in different contexts.
- Components and patterns: While a style guide tends to include guidelines and instructions for the design, component and pattern libraries (pattern library), on the other hand, contain predefined, reusable UI components. These components and patterns describe how interactive elements look and behave. For example, they define how a button changes color when clicked or tapped or how an accordion element folds out. The UI components and UI patterns are usually already implemented as a code snippet. Designers and developers can copy this code quickly and easily to create new applications and features.
- Best practices help to better understand the guidelines of the system and create a common understanding.
Design language of a brand
A design system therefore defines the design language with which the project team designs digital products and services – consistently and efficiently. On the one hand, it comprises the individual letters and vocabulary (components and patterns) of this language. On the other hand, it provides the grammar, i.e. the rules and principles that turn words into meaningful sentences. However, design systems are not a standardized set of rules. Rather, they are comparable to the Duden dictionary. Although it specifies the correct use of language, it is constantly adapting to new conventions.
Why is a design system useful?
Consistency
Many touchpoints, a coherent brand and userexperience: Users experience your brand via different touchpoints. With a design system, you promote the visual consistency of your brand across all channels and devices. This benefits companies, brands and users alike: The uniform look and feel strengthens your brand, as users get used to it more easily and recognize it better. The uniformity makes it easier for users to learn and understand the new products. This is because they can transfer familiar patterns from one product to another. This in turn reduces the cognitive load. Consistency thus ensures a positive user experience – and therefore a valuable differentiating feature for your brand.
Efficient development
A design system accelerates the design and development process in the company: With design systems, design can be replicated quickly and on a large scale and therefore scaled. The team does not have to solve and discuss design tasks again and again. Instead, they can (re)use the prefabricated components to develop extensions or new products. This reduces coordination and development efforts and avoids redundant work. The better a design system is structured, the faster new solutions can be created. This frees up resources that the design team can invest in more complex problems such as user journey management or workflow optimization.
Better cooperation
A design system improves collaboration, especially in multidisciplinary teams: it ensures that designers, developers and other stakeholders share the same understanding of design and speak the same visual language. This improves communication and collaboration between disciplines – but also with external parties such as agencies. Briefing agencies is easier and fewer correction loops are required.
Higher quality
Maximum quality assurance, fewer errors: As the teams use global components, the design system eliminates many sources of error and redundancies. The teams can also ensure quality and consistency more easily as there is only one single source of truth. The time saved can be invested by the team in tests such as usability or UI tests, for example, which further optimize the quality of the solutions.
Design system – the solution for everything?
A design system consists of more than just components, patterns, code, styles and guidelines: “It’s the purpose and connections that hold it together”(Alla Kholmatova, FutureLearn). It is people who create, manage and use design systems. It must therefore be clear to you: a design system does not per se ensure better products. The best design system is useless if the teams do not use it or use it correctly. There can be various reasons for this: A design system fundamentally interferes with familiar and perhaps cherished design and development processes. Familiarization also seems more time-consuming in the short term before efficiency gains pay off. The team may worry that the design system will restrict their creative freedom. A great deal of sensitivity and experience is therefore required when introducing the system.
It is not enough to create a design system once. Like a living organism, it continues to develop as an important part of the company. Similar to the products that are created from them, design systems must be continuously maintained, tested and further developed. This requires the appropriate workflows that are integrated into the design and development processes. The design system can be continuously improved with feedback from the teams and end users. If requirements change or new ones are added, the design system must also be adapted. A design system is therefore only as effective as the team that manages it.
Conclusion: design with a system
A design system helps your designers and developers to produce new products and features quickly and efficiently in projects. By reusing components, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. This leaves time and budget to concentrate on the essentials: the user experience. A design system optimizes the collaboration between design and development and eliminates many sources of error and redundancies. At the same time, it ensures the consistency that your brand needs. This allows you to offer your customers a consistent brand and user experience – across all media and platforms.
Would you also like to benefit from a design system? We support you – from creation to maintenance.
The author
Jasmin Hellmann (LinkedIn) is a Senior User Experience Designer. She has more than 5 years of experience in the user-centered design of user interfaces – from conception to visual design to development support, in interdisciplinary agile teams.
