This past week I went through Design System overview. It was facilitated by Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes. Here are my notes and thoughts.
Design System
·What does Design System mean?
At the core. It is the Interface design, visual language to UI component in a enterprise. There is a core team that keeps it well documented. The design system uses Design Tokens.
A design system purpose is to serve in making digital Experiences. A Design system. is a living roadmap & backlog, serving a eco system. This is for new and legacy products.
Cohesiveness / Consistency / Efficiency
How can you measure a design system?
- Other
- Quality
- Scale / Reuse
- Vocabulary
- Portability
- Accessibility
Visual Style
A company that has been incorporating a design system is Morningstar. http://designsystem.morningstar.com/
Strategic Approach
The two questions in a strategic approach is:
- How do you scale in a design system?
- How do you favor community over control?
Technical Architecture
How does a technical decision happen? Whos is the person or team that makes these decisions. The team that makes the design system serves the rest of the teams that consume it.
A company Design System should have the following:
- Demo App
- Output
- Website
- Contributions
- Code: features, fix, optimize
- Design: components, palettes, icon
- Downloadable asset: work
Questions to ask about the Lifetime of a design system:
- What Features will be shared
- How much will it cost to make or maintain
- Trigger momentum for a new direction
- How deeply can you document it?
- When can you complete the work?
Change means clear process:
A change starts with a Proposal-clarify-discuss-activate
What is the agreed core?
How do you version at the library level and component? Semantic versioning
A team with constant change has a version that changes with every sprint. The rate of change is lower and managed.
There are some companies where it is daily. It is because overlaying a design systems with open source.
How do you handle outside contribution with open source?
Other Questions and concerns:
- How does consistency maintain?
- What is our timeline to have a design system?
- Where do you start in a Design system?
- How to distribute a design system?
- How can we be assured that quality is there?
- Dependency management
- Decoupling
- How sophisticated are things going?
- Is the system that owns the product the owner?
- Translations and extensions to the design system.
- How do you influence the system?
- Use of system stabilizes at visual language.
- Re-platforming is a product strategy.
- Evidence is you converge a design system.
- Alpha iterations conform to styles
- Design systems
- Code Architecture