DESIGN SYSTEM TO ENABLE PRODUCT GROWTH

Empowering product growth with a Design System means developing, maintaining, sharing, and evangelising the design system culture.

In this post, I’ll explore the power of a design system and how companies can unlock value by relying on it.

Very often, I stumble upon business environments with several Design Systems, Design Languages, User Interface Showcases, Pattern Libraries, and User Interface Collections, each claiming to be the single source of truth and to cover the critical or essential business requirements and use cases.

Especially in the Fintech world, we have plenty of options for designing a pattern to solve a need/problem. Developing a design system is a great idea to share a tool that allows:

• Gain consistency across the family of products
• Optimise the collaboration between product people, designers and engineers
• boost the delivery process

Once we have clarified the value of building up a design system, we should also define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure it:

• Scale good standards
• Build-in accessibility
• Unify component style

Said that it’s a matter of fact that even with such bold preconditions, sometimes, the outcome is that the final products are not consistent with the examples/templates provided within the design systems.

What are the reasons why the final product is not 100% mirroring the design system?

Here I’ve collected some of the most frequent User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) gaps:

The tool I’ve found extremely helpful and powerful to solve these issues drastically is the user observation

Exactly!
For all products, the best way to improve your brand-new design system is to ask for feedback and observe how people interact with it.
You can book time to observe how developers use your design system, where they get lost, what they like most, and where they see room for improvement.
I’m sure that as soon as you observe people interacting with your widgets and components, you’ll notice how to reduce the friction.