Design: Design Systems

Starting every new project from scratch leads to unnecessary costs and labor, poor quality, and slow times to market. But according to Limina’s recent research in “The 2020 Design-Integration Report: 6 Best Practices to Build Design-Integrated Businesses that Win,” approximately half (49%) of companies do not reuse design artifacts and instead start UX design projects from scratch each time. A key reason that many organizations reinvent the wheel with every design initiative is that they lack reusable artifacts and repeatable processes.

Companies that have successfully integrated UX design into their organizations are more successful. UX design impacts the bottom line. As companies compete vigorously to innovate and enhance the customer experience, UX design has become more important than ever. So why aren’t more organizations investing in the reuse of design artifacts as a strategy for increasing efficiency and quality? Changing the way people and organizations work requires that they have solid examples of success and clear models to follow. The UX design industry has been lacking such examples. Read More

The use of design systems is becoming increasingly prominent today, especially for user-interface (UI) design. What is the reason for this? Design systems let designers structure their design workflows, communicate design-related decisions to their team members, and build consistent, reusable UI elements. Let’s begin by looking at the basics of a design system.

What Is a Design System?

A design system is a repository of reusable UI components. Using a design system, you can define UI elements such as navigation bars, buttons, text blocks, and dialog boxes that you can use repeatedly, throughout your UI designs. Consequently, a design system facilitates an easy design workflow. Read More

“Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.”—Steve Jobs

With the emergence of Node-based technologies such as React and Angular have come new opportunities for both UX designers and developers to leverage design systems to enhance their application user experiences. This article aims to help those of you who are weighing the advantages and disadvantages of using design systems and component libraries for your application.

Consider the scenario of a Web application that is being designed using a Material Design style, which could be built to specifications for one device, serving one operation, or could perform significantly differently under other conditions, in another context. When you consider the variances in how user interactions function, the value of leveraging a design system starts to pay returns as front-end development teams build out component libraries at scale, yet performance teams may also find variances in the user experience that are worth researching. Read More