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The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems
- tabtab 6y agoAll-or-nothing abstractions can make for chaos and confusion. Incremental abstractions seem a safer bet even if the longer-term result is not as good as the One Big Tool approach. Automate or simplify one aspect at a time. Look for the most common points of repetition and difficulties and work on those first.
- underwater 6y agoDesign Systems are great in theory, but in practice can devolve into navel gazing and just be a time suck for design and product organisations. In the worst case you end up with designers over reaching and designing UI and UX for all sorts of speculative use cases. And then acting as gatekeepers for anything that falls outside of that. If you want to use an element the system doesn't include then you need to make a case that your design is valid for a whole host of use cases you don't care about. The best design systems I've seen are trailing the rest of the design org, and document what is working rather than trying to skate ahead.
- k__ 6y agoI had the impression, design systems were things designers come up with and then get used by many projects/companies. Like Google's Material Design or Ant Design etc.
- MAGZine 6y agoNope, many companies have their own internal design systems for keeping look/feel of marketing materials, UIs, etc all consistent. Even at PlanGrid, when we were 450 people, we had our own design system.
- tomca32 6y agoI really don't have a feeling design systems are a hard sell unlike almost all other internal tools. It's the only internal tool I have seen that is consistently present at the vast majority of companies I have worked at. I also don't think they are ever worth the investment.
- andrekandre 6y agoi have first-hand witnessed design systems failures at some very large companies in my experience at least (in existing large companies) its easy to get buy-in but very hard to pull off properly, even when the ceo is behind it.