When to have a design "system" for your enterprise UX product
Short answer: Start with a style guide and not a design system.
Long answer: Read further :)
Off late I am noticing that when recruiters call to pitch their design openings, they unwittingly toss the word "design system" as one of the job responsibilities. Some even say that we expect you to come on board and create a design system for our startup. While it all feels like music to designers' ears, the real question is "Do you really need a design system on Day 1 for your startup?"
The answer would be yes if you think a design system is a bunch of standardised buttons and UI elements for your product. Such a standardised UI library would make UI development faster for sure. But technically that is a style guide or UI library. It is not a design system yet.
Design systems are created in the first place to scale design-development cycles across the many teams in the company. And for that, you need a supporting frontend UI codebase for the UI library that your designers have developed. So that any frontend engineer can just use the codebase and its configurations right away in his/her project.
Design systems that are not available as coded components is equivalent to driving a Lamborghini on a traffic filled city road. It is not totally worthless but definitely doesn’t serve the purpose of the vehicle.
So for all practical reasons, follow this simple evaluation
If you are just starting out with a formal design team for your company, start with the idea of a unified Style guide with re-usable UI components. Create variations for the use cases that you currently know. For sure this will change as your product matures. But at least your team will not use 10 different buttons in 10 different product pages.
As your product matures and you see yourself creating similar layouts or flows again and again, persuade the leadership to invest in dedicated frontend engineers to convert all your Figma/XD components into readily usable Frontend code. Make this as configurable as possible, so that tomorrow if your brand color scheme changes, the assets can be modified in the actual code without major breaks. Modularising a workflow into components is not a trivial task and more than talent or experience, this needs a small dedicated team of UI designers and a frontend developer.
And assuming the company matures into a large organisation with multiple design teams, then think of creating design principles rather than UI components. Because after a point of time, you may not be able to predict all the use cases that your product will require. You have to let the teams decide on that themselves but with guiding UX principles. This step is applicable for large legacy companies modernising their design operations too.
This is a super simplified checklist to know when to create a design system for your company.
Let me know some of the best and worst design systems that you have come across in your experience and help me understand why you feel that way. We will talk more about UX in enterprises in the future posts