By keeping the concept reusable, a design system helps a production team to build a product more quickly. However, even after everyone’s best efforts, the hard work put forward by a product team to create a smart design can sometimes go into vain.

There are several resources available online that describe design systems and how to construct one. However, realistic advice on how to maintain a design system remains scarce.

Let us bridge this gap. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can adapt to the design system revolution.

Promote Your Design System’s Adoption

More critical than developing a design system is promoting its widespread adoption. A design system establishes a new perspective for an organization, but whether that approach is accepted or not is highly dependent on how people respond to the alterations. Convincing people to adopt a particular design system might be a difficult request, based on the size of the firm. People will gladly accept a system only if they believe it is beneficial.

Establish a Vision Statement 

Which direction are we going? What are our objectives? Why are we attempting to do this? These are critical questions to address for an organization in order to develop a common vision.

A vision statement articulates the goals of your business, product, or service and, more crucially, why. The vision statement will serve as your North Star, uniting and guiding the staff toward a shared goal.

An easy method for developing the vision statement would be to express how you envision your product or company in five years. This will define a target audience.

Develop Guiding Principles For Design

What is your definition of excellent design? When evaluating the effectiveness of a design, artists frequently depend on their own set of criteria. However, when a team expands, this method can result in significant turmoil in the product design process, since each designer would get their own subjective ideas. This is when design principles come to the rescue.

Design principles serve as guidelines for the development team and aid in evaluation of their work. They substitute objective criteria for subjective ideals, assisting team members in making user-centered design choices.

Market Your Design System

You can build the finest system on the planet, but if your company does not aggressively promote it, the entire endeavor will suffer significantly. That is why, beginning with the initial launch of your system, you must work diligently to encourage adoption and build a network of supporters.

Promote the design system. Develop a volunteer group lead by experienced designers that will present and market ideas for your design system.

Minimize Duplicity Of Design Elements

Redundancy of design components results in fragmentation, which results in inconsistency. Recognizing design element duplication enables a team to prevent the situation in which members of the team create a component from scratch only to discover that a similar component already exists.

Performing an interface inventory, as Brad Frost describes, is a common method for determining what is in use. Just before you construct the real design system, it’s important to devote time and effort to an interface inventory, as working via this approach will allow you to discover problematic areas that require improvement.

Evaluate Your System Design Selection

Certain product teams feel that after developing a system, their work is accomplished. This is not true. It is critical to validate both the system design as well as the products that include it. As you examine the design, you will get confidence that your design is built on a strong foundation.

If you’re just getting started with integrating the system design within the design phase, start small and validate the system’s basis before expanding to larger portions.

Contact Us today to evaluate your design.