The ongoing global pandemic has sped up digital transformation, requiring organizations to move faster, be more agile, and quickly launch new products and services to better serve customers. Along with these new demands, many organizations face restricted budgets and fewer staff, increasing pressure on product, design, and marketing teams.
Organizations need to do more with fewer resources. To achieve this, it makes sense to adopt processes that break down silos, improve communication, increase productivity, streamline workflows, and reduce costs. For more insights on how organizations are adapting, watch this video.
As global organizations seek sustainable ways of working in the post-COVID world, design systems can help address inefficiencies and make resources go further at a lower cost.
What Are Design Systems?
Design systems are a set of reusable components used in both design and code to create larger, more complex objects. These components follow principles and standards that define the basics of the design, such as spatial systems, grids, and layouts. These rules help designers measure the size and space of user interface (UI) elements, ensuring consistency across the product. For more details, you can check out this blog article: https://linkupst.com/blog/design-systems-what-you-need-to-know.
The components also follow the atomic design approach. Atoms, which are simple UI elements like buttons or form labels, combine to form molecules. Molecules can then be combined to create organisms, which are complex sections of an interface. By incorporating a shared set of components into a design library, product teams have a consistent process for imagining, designing, and developing a product that integrates smoothly into their workflow.
Design systems enhance consistency, efficiency, and collaboration in a team’s processes, allowing them to create better interfaces, products, and experiences.
Here’s how:
- A design system serves as a single source for design principles and components used by various markets and product teams. By creating this single source of truth, it ensures that all products are designed and developed consistently. This consistency is crucial, especially as the team grows, as it ensures processes and tools help create uniform end-user experiences.
- The design library, where the components are stored, increases the speed at which product teams can work. Any changes made to components are automatically updated across all projects that use the library. This saves time, money, and energy, allowing product teams to focus on valuable activities like user testing. While cost savings will vary for each organization, these efficiencies can be significant, especially for large teams.
- A design system offers common tools and language that all team members can follow, uniting design and development teams with a shared understanding of the available UI components. This improves communication, inclusiveness, and clarity. By working collaboratively, teams across all markets can contribute and use the best components available.
Why Should Organizations Invest in Design Systems?
While business value is a key reason to consider creating a design system, it alone won’t create a system that benefits customers, designers, developers, and the business. Building an effective design system requires both bottom-up and top-down strategies, meaning that shared values must be embraced across the organization.
Design thinking is a process that teams use to understand users and create solutions through empathy and context, focusing on human-centered perspectives. Design system thinking extends this by helping us understand operational dependencies and creating a unified approach to design and development. For more information on this approach, visit Linkup Studio.
By combining design thinking and design system thinking, businesses can improve team interactions, gain broader perspectives from stakeholders, and take more thoughtful approaches to understanding and solving problems. This holistic approach creates more efficient processes and drives business value throughout the organization. To explore how AI can further enhance these efforts, check out AI consulting services: https://linkupst.com/services/ai-consulting.
These perspectives help build a single source of truth that guides developers and designers toward their goals. Designing products without considering feasibility and user feedback means users, designers, and developers won’t achieve their goals. Similarly, if products don’t support business objectives, stakeholders won’t meet their goals either.