It's important to understand the "why" for a design system in order to effectively align the design system with the overall business goals and to ensure that it addresses the specific pain points and challenges that the design team is facing.
Through conversations and interviews with designers and develoeprs, I learned the following:
There were a lot of research and learning the industry trends, standards, and best practices to ensure that the new design system is in line with current industry standards. Ultimately, I decided to use atomic design as the foundation for the new design system in order to create a more cohesive user experience.
To ensure a cohesive user experience for both designers and developers, I referenced many components from the previous design system, branding, and Google's Material Design. My goals were to develop a design system with tools that would allow our design team to rapidly prototype and improve the design process by allowing for faster iteration and testing of various ideas. They should give designers the flexibility and creativity they need to do their jobs, not the other way around.
**The design system was also iteratively tested with real designs to ensure that the interactions, layouts, and so on worked properly. Below are examples of my work.
To assess the performance of the new design system, I collected data at the beginning and end of the project for both the "old" and "new" design systems. This was accomplished through usability testing, which assisted in identifying various pain points and usability issues, as well as data on user satisfaction, ease of use, and flexibility of the two design systems. Below are the results.
With the new design system, the amount of time a designer must spend prototyping each screen has been reduced by 140%. A shorter average prototype time indicates that the new design system was well-suited to provide the tools required by our designers to rapidly prototype, allowing the team to focus on the most important parts rather than wasting time on unnecessary and redundant tasks.
The SUS score measures the usability of the design system and is an easy way to quantify overall designer satisfaction and ease of use. The old design system received a score of 38.75, while the new design system received a score of 80, bringing the system's SUS score from poor to excellent.
We decided to begin by creating a new Jira project to help document and serve as a channel of communication for the design system. However, design systems are complex and ever-changing, and a dedicated team is required to actively manage and maintain the design system, as well as ensure that it is aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization. Additionally, it's important that the team is able to collaborate effectively with other departments, such as development and marketing, to ensure that the design system is effectively integrated into all aspects of the product or service.
In speaking with other teams and working on this project, I discovered that facilitating adoption and cross-team buy-in was the most difficult challenge for any organization building a design system. There are currently two teams that have adopted the changes; I hope that the design team can use this as an opportunity to showcase success stories and case studies of how the design system has helped their teams improve their workflow and design quality with concrete results.
