Product Design is a continuous and an iterative process.
Managing design improvements on the go and handing off newly minted designs to the development teams gets very tricky especially when the team handles a complex product.
Screen-wise or page-wise design and development handoff is too rudimentary. What worked for simple websites, doesn't work for large products. An application is far more dynamic and complex. A number of interconnections and states must be considered.
It gets extremely difficult for designers to explain all the application states and responsive variants in a document using static mockups for the development teams.
Design iterations are hard on development teams. They get blocked by design teams. If they proceed without final designs in place typically inconsistency creeps in.
In a nutshell, managing design at scale is a nightmare.
Moving from page-based approach into a component-based model (atomic design) optimised design-developer workflows. But reusable components alone wasn't enough.
With component libraries in place, multiple sources of truth existed in many places (design tool, code, documentation) and without a governance model it was hard to improve the reusable components. This gave birth to a new way of working: Design Systems.
In a nutshell, a design system is product (scalable and repeatable system) that serves products. It can't be treated as a one-off project.
A design system is a time and energy intensive proposition. It requires a dedicated team to maintain and upgrade. It takes training for the product team to adopt and adapt to the design system. So for simple and one-off projects, a design system is not needed. Just a pattern library is good enough. Creating a design system for every project is like killing a mosquito with a bazooka.
A design system must include both tangible and intangible aspects of building scalable complex products (code, philosophy, libraries, principles and guidelines).
Whenever we build a design system for ourselves or our clients, we ensure it contains design language, design tenets, documentation, style libraries, component libraries, a sandbox to play around, best practices and a governance model that helps in managing the system.
Design system is a perfect example of Gall's Law.
John Gall said every complex system that works was invariably created from a simple system, and that every complex system that was created from scratch as a complex system always breaks and fails and cannot be patched to work.
A good design system helps in operationalising and optimising design efforts in a large organisation. Without good governance, a great design system can become unwieldy collections of components and code that makes product teams lives a living hell.
🥂 to design systems!
