A design system helps optimize the product development process's adaptability, efficiency, and agility. It helps a product flourish, not just survive possible changes in circumstances.
Design systems link design and development, helping improve communication among the design, marketing, dev teams, and end-users.
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Design System Definition
What is a design system? A design system is a visually well-structured compilation of logically consistent reusable elements, such as branding, rules, and style and usage guidelines. It is used to implement and organize an effective design interface and experience.
Design systems enable all product design and creation stakeholders to formulate, develop, and maintain the product’s standardized quality.
Design System Components
The essential design system components are functional factors derived from design elements put together to arrive at a user interface (UI). Selecting the right components in a design system is critical for an effective structure of organizational procedures.
These are the 15 main design system components:
Tabs
Tabs effectively categorize similar information on the same bar. These organize and make web pages easier to navigate and more readable. Titles should be concise to fit the tabs and enhance their appearance.
Tags
Tags label UI information for easy recognition and navigation around similarly categorized items—a single simple tag links to multiple variations of the same product.
Their colors can be customized for even better organization, particularly for larger amounts of content. This also improves user-friendliness.
Radio Buttons
A radio button helps limit user responses by allowing them to choose only one option simultaneously. This reduces the risk of system errors due to information overload or misinterpretation.
Buttons
A product design would not be complete without buttons, some of the most vital design system components.
Buttons are a means to redirect the user to an intended destination. They help users move through a series of screens and pages. They are also great at making calls-to-action (CTAs) pop. Ideally, a design should have a primary button followed by a secondary and tertiary button, as needed.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs allow users to navigate a design without getting lost or clicking the back button several times. They serve as links in a chain, displaying the hierarchy progress from the first level to the next.
Comments
Comments are crucial components in design systems. They are tools for feedback, user engagement, and interaction.
Forms
Forms are used to complete an action when user responses are required. These are the best ways to gather data. A form can be combined with other design system components, such as radio, CTA, checkboxes, and free text fields.
Dividers
Dividers may not be visible to end-users. This functionality is a crucial part of the design system to help make the layout look organized without their presence being actively noticeable to the audience.
Grid
A grid works similarly to a divider. It organizes visuals and other web page elements. Also, it functions as a blueprint for further development or possible changes by the designer.
Drawers
Drawers make various categories and sections on a webpage easier to find. A user does not have to constantly jump from one search results page to another to find relevant items.
Dropdown Menus
The dropdown menu functionality contributes to user-friendliness. It makes finding and selecting items convenient. Plus, it is space-saving and keeps a webpage from looking cluttered. Dropdown menus are also advantageous for designers and developers because these enable hassle-free modifications.
Banners
You can use banners or a notification bar as a promotional component of the page design. They should be vibrant and clear while remaining straightforward and minimal.
Progress Indicators
A progress indicator or progress bar lets users know how far they have made into a certain process. It can determine the time left before finishing an article or registering for a new feature through a form.
Tooltips
Tooltips are active design system components attached to other items on the page, like text links, icons, and buttons. They provide an explanation, description, and details about specific elements, delivering clarity to users.
Toggle
A toggle bar makes picking between two options or actions trouble-free. Some popular examples are opening and closing a menu and switching between light and dark mode.
Benefits of Design Systems
A design system impacts your team’s workflow, user experience (UX), and, consequently, your business goals. It also helps shape your overall branding.
Sean Doyce, CXO at Calibrate, states: "Design systems ensure consistency and streamline product iterations, such as new features or enhancements. We can deliver high-quality results quickly and efficiently with a well-planned design system. This structured framework fosters consistent, user-friendly, and visually cohesive digital experiences. Design systems include foundations, components, and more, ensuring continuity across all organizational products and platforms."
Here are the advantages you can gain from using design systems:
Scalability
With a design system laid out, you reduce the chances of running into issues when scaling your products during development and maintenance.
A design system enables you to build more products or add new features to an existing product without expanding your team exponentially. Since it centralizes and aligns decisions related to UI and design, it does not require more designers or developers to work on additional projects.
It is the most basic style guide and repository of code and design decisions that your entire team uses. Everyone owns and has permission to manage this framework.
Simple Maintenance
The centralized nature of a design system allows instant implementation of continuous enhancements and fixes. You can update products without worrying about creating errors. This is especially useful for frequent UI changes.
Consistency, Speed, and Productivity
Consistency has a strong impact on UX and your product image. Increased speed entails greater productivity. It means that people can do more in a shorter time. This drastically affects your company’s bottom line and helps cut costs.
Jenny Hamilton, Principal and Brand Design Director at Blossom Creative, finds Design systems particularly useful for cross-functional teams, such as when a client engages multiple agencies for marketing: “A strong design system ensures consistency across the brand, creating a unified visual identity. This consistency fosters brand recognition, even with varying campaign styles, which is impossible without a design system."
Benjamin Wild, Director at Enhanced Media Group, agrees: "Design systems streamline the creative process, enhancing brand consistency and significantly reducing time-to-market for our clients."
When drafted and put into practice properly, a design system can train your team of design and development experts, align their goals with your organization’s vision, and streamline workflows. Design specialists can also handle and resolve complicated UX problems minimally.
Code and Design Quality
Design systems ensure you get the highest quality of products. These help guarantee accessibility, customization, and extensive test coverage of every design component for a more optimized UX.
Knowledge Sharing
A design system is a documentation of methods and tools to build products. It is imparted among the development and design teams. This ensures that all policies are clear and understood, and colleagues are consistently aligned in the implementation process.
It is the first touchpoint for all team members involved where quality expectations are set. A properly shared system can significantly shape your team’s successful collaboration. This helps avoid the bus factor or a situation wherein a team member is left out of the loop.
Bridging Product Gaps
Building a brand personality involves graphic design and product naming. You must create a UI component library with a carefully crafted design system to get consistent results. It should consist of style guidelines, shared principles, and philosophy that will be reflected in all your products.
Shared Design Principles and Philosophy
Your design principles link ideas and explain how they can be realized, whereas your design philosophy is the underlying foundation of these ideas.
Principles emphasize the accessibility of a product and focus on delivering a great UX to all audiences. Philosophy is anchored on the goals you intend to accomplish with a certain product and how to bring in the design principles to achieve these goals. Ultimately, these two concepts combine to create a valuable and rewarding product.
Shared Ownership
A design system connects everyone on the team, giving them a feeling of involvement, accountability, and ownership. It will allow your team members to speak the same design language throughout the product design, development, and improvement processes.
This will encourage them to contribute to the design system, maximizing their skills and specializations. These peer contributions are significant factors for speed enhancement and overall product quality. They can detect and fix bugs before end-users notice. They can also improve features to avoid potential glitches.
Conclusion: Why Your Business Needs a Design System
Drawing on his experience, Ivan Klyzhenko, CEO of Uitop, sums up the benefits of design systems:
- Fewer bugs and rework: A design system reduced UI-related bugs by 53% for developers struggling with design inconsistencies.
- Improved collaboration and communication: A unified design system streamlined cross-functional reviews, cutting meetings by 27% as everyone adopted a common "design language."
Building and using a design system for streamlined product development procedures ensures your brand thrives long-term.
With reusable and interchangeable design system components, your design and dev teams can scale your projects more quickly. They can evolve and adapt products according to varying user demands.
Efficiency and consistency are the most valuable attributes of design systems. They showcase cohesiveness across all products under your brand name. These traits are essential when reaching through multiple channels and expanding into different platforms.
The absence of a system leads to clutter, chaos, problems, and unwarranted expenditures. Conversely, with a design system, you can highlight how neat, unique, flexible, and standardized your high-fidelity products are.
A professional product design agency can also help you with this process, so we advise looking for the right agency to partner with for your project.
