Why Your Design System is Prone to Failure

How to Ensure Your Design System is Universally Adopted

Imagine you're on a product design team, creating a comprehensive design system that will bring significant benefits to the team – and beyond. Developing new features will be faster and more efficient. The design of your digital products will be more consistent, and scaling or building new ones will be faster and easier. You know you're doing the right thing and can't wait to see your efforts pay off.

You launch your product, and months later, you discover another team in your organization didn't use your design system for a product they launched. As a result, it looks, feels, and functions entirely differently. In addition, new features have been introduced to the product you worked so hard to design and develop. Those features don't use your design system either. It's frustrating and demoralizing. Why spend so much time and energy building a flexible, scalable system? You could have just built the same inconsistent product with much less effort, documentation, and stress.

The Truth About Design Systems 

So, how could this happen? It’s fairly simple. A design system isn’t magic. It’s a tool. And like any tool, it only works when people use it. That’s why it’s crucial to have a community of supporters who will advocate for and invest in the system from the start. A design system will only be used when it’s abundantly clear that it works well for everyone — designers, developers, product owners, and a multitude of stakeholders. How can you ensure that happens?

It’s best to think of your design system in a broader context than the current product you’re developing. A proper design system is not a brand style guide, it’s not a UI kit, and it’s not just a set of UX specifications. A sound design system is a lot more like designing a product that designs other products. So, if it’s a product, we need to plan, design, develop, and launch it just like any other digital product. That means you’ll need a product team for the design system too. And you’ll need buy-in from stakeholders outside your product team who can advocate for the design system product and help implement support, updates, and governance. This will ensure it has a meaningful life beyond the launch of the current product.

Squad Goals

You’ll need a design system squad, with members including a design lead, a development lead, and a product owner. The product owner keeps the squad focused on the goal. The development lead can help make the design more usable and sustainable by advising on development best practices and maintaining the concept of Innersource. Innersource refers to open source solutions for internal teams that can help with the adoption and maintenance of the system after creation. 

You'll also need project sponsors and stakeholders, just like you do when developing any other product. Consider whether you'll need support from IT, other product teams, or a brand or marketing team. From there, the project should run just like any other product design – in phases:

Discovery

Like any discovery, this phase is about getting answers to the right questions. What problems will your design system product solve, and for whom? Where could the system's adoption fail along the product development cycle and during the product's lifetime? What other products will your organization need to create in the future? How can this system scale accommodate those future products too? It's best to set up squad OKRs during this phase as well. You might consider OKRs for design and development productivity, adoption, gathering feedback, and more.

Ideation

You’ll need to find unique answers to some of these questions and generate ideas for new components and how the system will be organized. What about visual design? How will your brand be expressed in this solution? 

Execution

You’ll need to prototype your system and use it in real-world scenarios. How can you use it to design the current product? Work with developers on using tokens and your process for integrating software like Figma and Storybook. You’ll also have to define a process for updates and improvements.

Validation

Can designers design with your system? Can developers use it? Can product owners and managers understand and implement it? Does it work for end users? You’ll need to track quantitative KPIs: which projects and squads are using the design system? Which version are they using? What are the number of original components used in new projects, and which specific components are regularly used? And you’ll need some qualitative data: What’s the perceived value of the design system in each context, and what’s your ROI?

Evolution

Once your system is up and running or development is in full swing, meet to discuss how the system will evolve. For example, how do you create, deploy, and communicate new releases of the system? How do you implement and enforce governance for the system so it continues to work, scale, and evolve and isn’t abandoned?

Learn from Our Experience

At CI&T, we have helped some of the biggest brands in the world design, develop, and implement scalable, working design systems. Our clients include ABInBev, UNICEF, the Vivo brand of Telefônica Brasil, Siemens, and First Hawaiian Bank. Here’s what we’ve learned from those experiences:

• Think of the design system as a product, and plan, design, develop, and launch it just like you would any other digital product.

• Put together a design squad that's responsible for the system.

• Get project sponsors and stakeholders on board to support the system's launch, governance, and ongoing maintenance.

It's worth it. When properly implemented, design systems result in time savings, cost efficiency, scalability, usability, and consistency that can bring measurable business benefits to your organization.

---