Why Your Enterprise Needs a Design System

Uniting designers and product teams can be tricky, and as a result, many organizations struggle to deliver a cohesive, consistent experience across the user journey.

Unsurprisingly, scaling up only exacerbates the problem. At the enterprise level, almost 60% of organizations reported that improving consistency was their biggest UX challenge.

Many have adopted an Agile or hybrid “Agile-fall” approach, and of these organizations, a huge 69% confirmed that they are now using a design system or pattern library in a bid to tackle inconsistency and inefficiency in the design process.

So what is a design system?

Simply put, a design system is a company’s bible for designing and building digital products. More than just a style guide, it contains the principles and guidelines for when and how design elements should be used, plus the reusable representation in code for each element.

A single source of truth for everyone in the company, a design system gives designers and developers a common language that underpins their communication. This allows teams to improve consistency across all products and platforms, and create a more valuable and cohesive experience for users.

Streamlining the design and development process this way also results in significant efficiency gains and increased productivity for teams.

Why introduce a design system?

Having multiple design and development teams work on various digital products, or even different parts of the same product, invariably leads to duplication of work, employee frustration, and an inconsistent experience for the user.

While any organization can face these challenges, the consequences – and the associated costs – are amplified in large corporate environments due to the sheer scale.

At the enterprise level, it is normal to see departments focusing on different goals with competing priorities, and effective communication becoming increasingly difficult as the organization grows. Consistency, which is crucial for maintaining the image of big brands, suffers as a result. Let’s take a look at some popular problems in enterprises, and how the introduction of a design system can help solve them.

Inefficiency

When a new developer joins a large corporate organization and is asked to build a landing page, in the absence of a design system, they would have no choice but to turn to senior colleagues for help.

The more experienced developers may be able to provide an example of a previously built landing page that can be used as a template, and they may be able to offer advice on best practices. Not only is this time consuming and inefficient, but when this scenario is repeated multiple times across the organization, inconsistency is bound to creep in.

On the other hand, a design system would provide the designer with a set of established rules and principles, as well as pre-built components.

Using the Atomic Design methodology, parts like buttons, switches, and checkboxes are treated as molecules, and these can be combined into bigger components known as organisms.

For example, a form can be created by combining name, phone, and email input fields with a button labelled ‘send’. This form could be included on the landing page as a call-to-action part. A good design system contains many of these organisms, which can then be used to form templates.

In this scenario, the new developer would be able to create the requested landing page, on their own, in only a few hours.

Not only are these reusable components helpful to new employees but also the business as a whole. With developers now using the design system, the amount of duplicated work is greatly reduced. Plus, with more efficient development freeing up time, employees can focus on what really adds value, e.g. content and marketing.

Inconsistency

As a single source of truth, a design system provides everyone involved in the process with established conventions and principles.

As everything is consistently named, there can be no doubt that a component under discussion is the same for everyone, which helps avoid confusion and error. Similarly, debates over the anatomy of designs or changes made by creatives are eliminated. If the design system states that a button has a 4px corner radius, this is what must be used.

For large enterprises operating on a global scale, the impact is huge.

For example, a company may wish to tailor its website to each country’s customer base, with differences in the offer based on cultural and behavioral differences. It may be the case that each country’s website is handled by a different digital agency.

Such a complex situation is easily handled by a design system. With access to the guidelines and principles, plus all necessary templates, each agency is able to focus purely on creating the right content and information architecture, and working closely with the local teams. Consistency in design and branding improve immeasurably, and control is maintained on a global scale.

Creating a design system for enterprise-level organizations

While it may seem like a panacea for all problems, building a successful design system is not an easy task. You will need a dedicated team of designers and developers working continuously to meticulously craft the design system.

Past designs should be taken into account, which may reveal a surprising number of similar components in use with only small differences. Designers should adopt an Atomic Design approach and consider theOccam’s Razor principle to reduce all unnecessary elements to a minimum.

It is important to be aware that a design system is a living, breathing ecosystem, and that the task of building one is never complete. The system should be constantly updated, allowing it to evolve with the company.

The creators of some of the biggest and most successful design systems in the world have shared them with the community to help shape a better digital world.

Take some time to get acquainted with the most popular ones and incorporate best practices into your own design system:

• Material Design by Google, used also by many developers. You can find its characteristic patterns almost everywhere, e.g. shadows, CTA, interactions, floating action buttons, and much more.
• AXA Design System by AXA.
• Audi Design System by Audi.
• Polaris by Shopify.
• Carbon by IBM.
• Atlassian Design System by Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Trello).

Finally, consider whether you have the necessary experience and capacity to successfully build an enterprise design system in-house. If not, you may find it invaluable to bring in the expertise of an agency to augment your capabilities.

Wrapping up

Many companies face challenges associated with building multiple enterprise digital products, however at the enterprise level, problems and their consequences increase exponentially. Corporations are tackling lack of consistency in user experience and inefficiency in the design process by turning to design systems.

The advantages are numerous and impressive.

Consistency is vastly improved, the control over branding is increased on a global scale, and greater efficiency in design and development teams boosts employee satisfaction. In addition, companies are able to spend more time focusing on the customer and deliver a higher quality product as a result.

At Netguru, we have a wealth of experience in making design systems for companies of all sizes. If you’re ready to create your own, we’re here to help.