Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Joe Pascavage

Let’s create better platform experiences with a design system.

“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” ~Paula Scher

You can’t fathom the amount of design and technical debt I’ve witnessed stack up throughout the years in both large and small organizations—and no matter how much you chip away—it inevitably just grows and unfortunately even collects dust. I typically always find myself in a position where I’m either spear-heading the creation of some sort of a style guide, performing a visual and interaction audit or diving into not so simply creating libraries of Sketch and Photoshop templates to share among a sea of designers that may or may not use them.

I’ve done all of this because of two simple reasons; inconsistency and inefficiency. Because as a person who has an absolute passion for design this drives me completely bananas, and I can’t stand witnessing the chaos. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way—to be honest I’m not sure what designer doesn’t at least feel the same to a degree. Especially when the awesome experience we’re spending so much time to develop is at risk of not making any sense, and obvious becomes less and less.

With good design, obvious is not something that’s easy to come by. It’s the result of a lot of iteration in the design and development process to get to a place where something just works. It just simply is obvious. It’s where we find that what we’re designing helps the users relationship with technology. Simple and obvious opportunities are all too often missed for silly reasons like there are one too many conflicting shades of gray — or there are too many variances in how a call-to-action is styled.

One may criticize another in thinking the opposite just isn’t doing their job adequately. When in reality as product organizations grow, and especially if you’re a design and engineering team spread across numerous sub-teams, you will suffer from this a hundredfold. Time and effort you spend chasing down the debt will leave you feeling like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”.

“How can we do things faster, more efficiently — more simply.” ~Aaron Walter

Why Consider a Design System?

Let’s first acknowledge that design is still bespoke. It’s struggling to scale with applications because we’re often times designing tailor-made solutions for individual problems. Having a living and breathing design system in place will allow us to enable our teams to build better products, more quickly. It’ll help us make design reusable, and that reusability, in turn, is what makes scale possible for us. At its core, this is what the number one benefit is of having a design system.

We’ll help provide a future-friendly foundation for all to work more efficiently. If we’re pushing our teams to work too fast without a design system in place, the reality is bespoke design doesn’t scale—not in the slightest. It’s very slow, inconsistent, and awful to maintain. With a design system, product teams are still going to be able to move faster—but they’ll be smarter about it.

Think also beyond this as simply a tool for just designers — this is an ever-evolving bible in a sense for engineering, product, and design to always fall back to. When these teams aren’t working through solutions together we’re losing the opportunity to build empathy and learn from one another. Doing so will ultimately help you create your own system that’s rock-solid.

When teams grow, it’s very common to focus on specific areas of a product and you can potentially become less connected to one another. This leads to a very disjointed visual language where parties begin speaking their own nomenclature. You’re now solving problems individually and not systematically. Once you begin to realize how inconsistent, incomplete, and difficult to maintain this madness is—you will understand the necessity of developing a sharing power like this which will, in turn, restore efficiency.

Resources

There are a number of organizations out there that have made their systems public to gain inspiration from. Google’s Material Design used to be the main one that was always tossed around in conversation over the years. As of recently though more and more literature has been popping up to help you kick-start your own design system which is great to see! A few of my own personal favorite are:

Brad Frost’s Atomic Design — Check out any and everything from this guy in general. Brad tells it how it is and it’s extremely refreshing.
Design Systems Handbook—InVision and DesignBetter.co teamed up on this wonderful piece about building your own design system. It’s a must-read for sure.
InVision Design System Manager—If you haven’t heard yet, check out this new tool coming soon from InVision. I’ve only had early access to the beta for the last few weeks but so far it looks very promising. Perfect for those struggling to kick off building the foundation of the system itself. It integrates beautifully with Sketch as well 👍🏼
Salesforce Lightning Design System—Personal favorite of mine. Salesforce in my mind is setting a benchmark for creating the ultimate design system. It’s easy to follow and so very clear and succinct. You can also access it here on GitHub.

I hope you enjoyed this read and will find value in how a design system may be of benefit to your team. At the core of it all, we should always be reminding ourselves that we’re problem solvers! Let’s embrace this when approaching how to scale design more systematically as it will allow us to expand on new and exciting opportunities more quickly, and still keep team members aligned and in sync.

Please feel free to place any comments below or just shoot me a message directly as I’d love to chat more about your own experience with design systems. ✌🏼

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Scaling Design

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