First Product, Lasting Impact: How design systems reflect company culture.

Your DS is the first product your org builds. It’s not only an arbiter of design maturity, it reveals how your company functions.

To get humans to adopt and do things it helps to understand their goals. DS adoption is tied to motivation—to understand what that is, it helps to be goal-directed.

 

What makes a DS unique from the product it supports are user types. Your org may have many. Generally, the personas are:

  1. The End User/Customer

  2. The Designer

  3. The Developer

There are research methods to help diagnose the health of your DS. I suggest a researcher (UXR) a visual designer (UI) and an Interaction Designer (IxD) work closely together to uncover this—the trifecta we call UX. Or someone who has focused on all three for a while.

Here are a few of the symptoms that hint to organizational issues from my experience researching, branding, crafting and leading 50+ custom design systems over the last 25 years.

Inconsistent use of messaging, voice, tone, look and feel? Weak collaborative tissue between the design teams in marketing and the design teams in product. There is no ownership or system for content design.

Unlearnable visual language? The system has NO SOUL. Design Systems become subjective when they lack an advocate and a documented DNA rooted in product branding that ties form with function: learnable aesthetics that support expected behavior.

No reusable components? You don’t have a developer advocate DEDICATED to representing engineering. Most likely the dev teams are siloed using different jack-in-the-box frameworks. Design Systems work when they allow development to focus on what matters to them. Find out what that is and your Design System will help facilitate it. ️

Polishing a Turd? I believe in moisturizer and sunblock and we also need to do the work to hydrate. If your design system drops off a level deep; is absent when you get to the mundane yet important stuff like forms—where users are doing the manual tedious (yet important) tasks like doing the data-entry-for-you…then your team is too busy putting out fires to sweat the important details. Like a mullet, your users will NOT take it as a: “party-in-the-back” they will feel scammed.

f any of this rings true your design system may have adoption challenges. Communicate WHY the change is important for the end user, designer AND developer. If not it will be viewed as a nice-to-have with no sense of purpose or urgency and updates will be seen as arbitrary.

If you want to hydrate over all things UX, Product or whatever you want to call it let’s meet in-person in San Francisco and online at ADPList.

LinkedInPinterestTumblr