The product development process is complex by itself and involves many steps, and sometimes multiple designers working on the project. Therefore, design systems are essential for keeping product design consistent and avoid chaos. In today’s article, we will explore what the design system consists of, how to build your own, and many more.
Breaking down the design system
To properly understand how to operate with the design systems you need to understand their essence – what they consist of. Let’s start with the UI elements, which are all reusable and can be combined to create the new product from the same system. Design system’s UI components are:
- Design patterns
- Text styles
- Icons
- Grid System
The next element of the design system is the color palette. This part is essential for design consistency. It is based on primary colors and accent colors. The color palette needs to be considered carefully as it influences the components of the whole design system.
Another element to think about is the typographic scale. This and typefaces are essential for your design system and therefore for your future product.
Last but not least, the important part of the design systems is the rules and principles and UX guidelines. They help to put everything together and make it work.
How to build a design system
So, with a clearer understanding of the design systems composition, now let’s move on to how to create your own. You may incorporate your own tactics and methods to building your design system, but there are some essential steps you need to consider. They are:
- Start with what you already have. Begin with analyzing and researching the already existing apps. This is a great way to collect your already existing UI assets and turn them into a universal guidebook. You should include everything essential for your design system, including color schemes, icons, graphics, UI patterns, etc.
- Check the system. When you gathered all the components of your design system, it’s essential to test them. Meaning whether each element satisfies designer and development requirements and is fluid, consistent, and accessible.
- Documentation is essential. The documentation is indeed helpful for the designers in your company to understand and navigate the design system. Moreover, it’s very useful to provide the description of each component, explaining its purpose and its best application to make everything even more clear for people using them.
- Involve the whole team in the process. Getting the whole team to cooperate on the design system creation can help them to understand its purpose and will encourage them to contribute. Also, this is an efficient way to search for errors in your system.
How to make it work for your product
Sometimes it may be not enough to know how to build a design system. The trick and the ultimate goal are to make it work for your product. It should help the product you’re designing to achieve its purpose. You need to understand that you’re not inventing anything new, you’re just picking the best approach, based on your existing assets. Therefore, you need to analyze them carefully and create the right strategy for implementing your design system. Here are some steps to assist you in this:
- Understand the back-end logic of the application. This step is very helpful when you want your app to be functional and work without any issues. Also, it will help you to better understand your system in general.
- Make it flexible. Your design system doesn’t have to be rigid. On contrary, it should be flexible and adapt to the user’s need, while not changing in its core and purpose.
- Build a coherent look. A great product design usually has a familiar look for users. It’s essential for them to not get lost and perceive clearly how the product works. So, use your design system with this in mind.
- Think about devices your app will be run on. Another obvious step that however is often neglected is to make your design work consistently on a variety of devices. It should be stable and feel natural for users.
- Ensure the efficiency and consistency of the design team. Finally, for the successful implementation of the design system you need to ensure that your team works efficiently, clearly understands the purpose of the product, and can use the design system without failures. In this case, DesignOps can come in handy.
Examples of efficient design systems
One of the best ways to understand something is to see it in action. There are a variety of already existing design systems that are highly successful in achieving their purpose. To build your own you can get inspiration from one of those. Here are some great design systems examples:
- Shopify Design System
- Microsoft Fluent Design System
- Uber Design System
- Airbnb Design System
To sum up
Your design team might be not consistent as people come and go, but your design should be. Therefore, design systems are essential for your product design. Besides helping your designers to understand how they should design your product, it also helps to detect errors quickly, make everything look organically, and makes the whole design process efficient. Isn’t it amazing?