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> The mere existence of a design system warping the design process and the value of design as a discipline. Despite having a lot of experience making them and
by karaterobot 3y ago
> The mere existence of a design system warping the design process and the value of design as a discipline.
Despite having a lot of experience making them and using them, and despite them being a keyword a lot of companies ask for in job postings, I took any mention of "design systems" out of my resume because I would prefer to work for a company that didn't index on designers who rely on design systems. I've just seen them used as bludgeons too often, i.e. "why would we implement this design when it doesn't match our design system?" well, because it's the right way to do it in this new case we've never seen before. I think design systems and component libraries become a way to reuse existing work instead of rethink and rework, which is convenient but often antithetical to doing the right thing in a changing environment. I understand that product teams have to move quickly. I'm here to do work I'm proud of, which sometimes brings me into tension with the organization's desire to save time and labor, which is to say money. Design systems—not the theoretical idea of them, but the way they are applied in the real world—are becoming a symbol of that for me.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt's a double-edged sword. Design systems constrain designers, so each greenfield project isn't a delightful creative experience for designers and a hard slog for the engineers making another similar-but-different interface. However, this constraint can be over-applied.
- starkparker 3y agoAnd even you have multiple projects or products at one company, and they don't talk to each other, and they work on different aspects of the same problem, and each of them has their own designer, they all invent similar tools with different, inconsistent designs that are a nightmare to use.
- Spivak 3y agoThe things you list as criticism are exactly the reason places implement design systems. You're clearly an east coast school of thought person who takes pride in building the "right thing." But people who implement design systems are taking the worse is better approach on purpose. They see it as better to be clunky and contort functionality into the existing components and ship than spend time doing something custom.
- n8cpdx 3y agoAnd unless the design system is really bad it shouldn’t be that clunky. Design is design, not art, each new app in a product suite should not be a unique snowflake, but a piece of the puzzle. People are acting like there are actually new never-before-seen scenarios in CRUD web apps. I’ve only ever seen situations where the designer thought they needed to break the mold, never where it was actually necessary.
- justinkramp 3y agoFeel like this especially true in design systems where they went as far as a few dozen atoms but did not progress to molecules or components (insert corollary term here). This exposes a lack of understanding the business and user needs.
- enhdless 3y agogenuine question because I've never heard this phrase, and search engines did not yield useful results: what do you mean by "east coast school of thought"? and then is there a corresponding "west coast school of thought"?
- esafak 3y agoThe two schools of thought here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- enhdless 3y agoThank you, TIL! I will admit I was briefly even more confused reading that the "west coast" model includes New Jersey (an east coast state) and the "east coast" model includes Stanford (a west coast university)... but whatever lol.
- Waterluvian 3y agoA very realistic step of my design system is to go back and update the design to match the assorted minor differences discovered as ideal during implementation.
- spoonjim 3y agoIt all depends on how much the customers depend on uniformity between use cases. One thing that a strong design system does is force uniformity between products which can be a boon to confused customers.