Design Systems: Bring consistency across digital platforms

What’s Inside?

Design systems have become essential tools for creating consistent and cohesive user experiences across multiple products. A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and principles that provide a unified visual and interactive language for designers and developers. It serves as a blueprint for designing and building products, helping teams create and maintain a consistent look and feel across platforms and devices.

Style Guide, Pattern Library, and Design System: What’s the difference?

The Style guide and the Pattern Library are just some of the deliverables of a Design System.

A Style Guide -as indicated by its name- will focus on graphic styles (colors, fonts, illustrations…) and their usage.

A Pattern Library will integrate functional components and their usage.

A style guide is a document that outlines the design principles, guidelines, and best practices for a specific project or product. On the other hand, a design system is a comprehensive collection of design elements, patterns, and components that are used to create a consistent visual language across multiple products and platforms.

Style guides are like “strict parents” that tell you what colors to use and where to use them, while design systems are like “cool older siblings” that give you a variety of options and let you choose how to make your art.

Benefits of Design System:

• Increased Revenue: A design system can help increase revenue by providing a consistent and intuitive user interface, improving the overall user experience, speeding up the design and development process, reducing redesigns and rework, increasing accessibility, and improving collaboration between teams. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and faster time-to-market for new products and services, ultimately driving more sales and revenue for the business.
• Reduced Maintenance Cost: A design system can help to reduce maintenance costs by providing a consistent and structured approach to design and development. By having a set of reusable components and guidelines, it becomes easier to maintain consistency across different products and services, reducing the need for redesigns and rework. This can save time and money on the development process. Additionally, a design system also provides clear documentation, which makes it easier for new team members to understand and work on the product, reducing the need for extensive training and onboarding costs. By providing a user-friendly interface and clear guidelines, it also reduces the need for customer support, which can also help to reduce maintenance costs. Overall, a design system can help to improve scalability and flexibility, reduce redesigns and rework, simplify issue identification and resolution, provide clear documentation, reduce the need for extensive training, and reduce the need for customer support.
• Streamline the Design Process: One of the main benefits of design systems is that they streamline the design process, making it more efficient and less expensive. A set of reusable components allows designers to focus on solving specific design problems rather than reinventing the same solution over and over again. This allows you to spend more time creating new and innovative designs instead of repetitive tasks. This allows designers and developers to quickly and easily implement pre-approved design system elements, thus speeding time-to-market and reducing the need for extensive design and development efforts.
• Maintaining Consistency: Another important benefit of design systems is the ability to maintain consistency across different products and platforms. The theming system allows designers to ensure that all products have a consistent look and feel regardless of the platform where they are displayed. This is especially important in today’s digital environment where products are frequently accessed on a variety of devices such as smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Consistency ensures that the user experience is consistent across different touchpoints and helps create familiarity and trust.
• Brand Recognition: You can also use the theming system to create a more consistent user experience. This is critical to building a strong brand and maintaining customer loyalty. Providing a familiar and consistent experience across products makes it easier for users to recognize and trust your brand, making them more likely to continue using your products in the future. This increases customer retention and loyalty, and may even lead to positive word-of-mouth marketing for him.
• Better Communication and Collaboration: It can improve communication and collaboration between different teams within an organization. For example, a design system can be used to provide clear guidelines on how to create and implement designs that are accessible, responsive, and mobile-friendly. This helps to ensure that all teams are working towards the same goals and that the final product will be usable for all customers.

A few Mandates

Creating a design system can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. First, we recommend creating a design inventory of all existing components and patterns of your product. This will give you a good idea of what you already have and what you are missing. Then you can create a design language that guides the design process, including typography, color, spacing, and other elements that are used consistently across all products. This design language serves as a reference for the team and helps ensure that all elements of the design system are consistent.

It is also essential to involve everyone involved in the system design process. This includes designers, developers, product managers, and other members of the team. By involving everyone in the process, the design system is more likely to be aligned with the needs of the entire team, adopted, and used effectively. This also helps ensure that your design system is inclusive and considers the needs of all users, including those with disabilities.

After all, a design system should be a living document that is constantly being updated and improved. This means that designers should be encouraged to contribute new components and patterns to the system and that the system should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure it is suitable and effective. This process should be done in collaboration with the entire team to ensure that the design system is executed.