With each passing year, the number of companies in different
sectors keep on growing, with this growth comes the need for companies
to stand out amongst their competitors. This is usually done by them
building up a distinct identity for themselves via the use of a design
system.
Design System, what is it?
Design system is more than just what a company’s product looks
like, it consumes the whole of the company such as the patterns and
practices the company follows to set itself out amongst the crowd. With
these patterns come certain standards that have to be met for the
company to adhere to the system.
A design system is very important for a company to have, this is because
it helps them stand out amongst the crowd and also helps in their
scalability as they continue to grow bigger over the coming years.
Another advantage of having a design system is that it helps the
products of the company to be marketable on any platform.
Building a Design System
There are several steps that can be taken for a design system to be built, they are:
1) Set up a strong design team or hire a well reputed team
2) Set design principles as well as patterns for the team to follow
3) Fixate on a set of rules and standards that the team has to follow for all their projects
4) Always try and improve the design system by taking in feedback from the clients as well as the employees
5) Try integrating feedback on the system as forwarded by AI or Machine Learning
6) Build an interactive application after all the parameters are set to check for what can be improved
7) Fixate on certain profitable platforms for the application like desktop, mobile, IoT devices, and wearables.
Keeping track of the Return on Investment
The impact that design system causes on the company over a
period of time can be hard to measure because of its abstract nature.
Design systems are part of the products that the company releases and
usually fall under the category of customer experience.
One
of the ways to keep track of how a specific system has impacted the
company is to keep track of the number of changes that have been made in
the company application’s UI based code such as the CSS files over a
long duration. If the change that has been made is improving the
performance of the company and there are less changes being made in the
future then it can be vouched for that the design system has a great
impact.
Finally, the thing that confuses all companies is
on how to scale up their design systems to match the growing performance
of the company. To make a system scalable, a general rule of thumb is
to keep it relatively basic and simplistic. The more complex a company’s
design system is the more difficult it gets to scale up the system.
To
end, when planning for a design system it is always necessary to keep
in mind not only the company’s present situation but also what it will
grow up to be.