Design Systems - Business Advantages

TLDR;

Implementing a design system - a library of reusable UI components - significantly improves development efficiency. It speeds up building interfaces by letting developers focus on new features instead of common elements. It also ensures branding consistency and better UX. Despite the initial cost to create components, design systems save much time and money long-term. They enable faster iterations, shorter backlogs, and more agility. For both large and small organizations, a design system is an essential part of modern software development.

As I explained in this article, a design system is a productivity toolbox for your development team. Inside that toolbox, we will have many interface components to be used and reused across the organization's interfaces.

These components are built(design and code) as abstract prototypes with robustness and flexibility in mind because they will need to work on multiple scenarios.

Bad news first, the main downside of this approach is that these components are harder to build, requiring more time to design, develop and test.

The good news is that once one of these components is finished, chances are they won't change anytime soon and will be used and reused in multiple instances and applications without much regard for how it works internally.

Quickly exemplifying, let's assume an organization has a solid component for a button. You can choose which brand's colors you'd like to use and if you'd like to have an icon before or after the text (obviously, you can also choose the icon). All this through a mini API for the button. From this point, every single button your developers will need to add to any interface they are working on will be using this component. That means they will never need to work on a button ever again. And then, you'll provide them with a Card component, a few form controls, a header, a footer, a complete contact form. Got the idea?

A design system will make interface production exponentially easier to develop. For each component added to the design system, fewer components will need to be custom developed for each application. It has the potential to make each subsequent interface increasingly faster to build, freeing up the developer workforce to do other things.

The most obvious upside of this process is delivering more features faster and burning through your backlog quicker.

Another often overlooked upside is to reduce the cost of opportunity for product teams. It becomes much easier and faster for a small team to put together prototypes and test ideas in the wild. Even though this advantage is tough to measure, there is a real benefit in quickly testing ideas and assumptions for new products and features.

It should work well for small organizations, allowing them to test ideas with significantly fewer resources. It should work really well in larger organizations for the same reasons because it will enable small teams to run ideas as "skunkworks" projects.

Other advantages:

• faster development

• cheeper iterations

• shorter backlogs

• smaller dev teams

• nimbler teams

Marketing Advantages:

• branding and consistency

• quicker A/B testing

• easier to spinoff promotional websites

• better UX

• better accessibility

• better SEO

In summary, implementing a design system can have tremendous benefits for an organization's productivity and efficiency. By investing the time upfront to create reusable interface components, developers save significant time down the road by simply reusing those elements instead of rebuilding common parts from scratch. This accelerates development cycles, allows faster iterations and testing, and frees up developers to work on more innovative features.

From a marketing perspective, a design system also ensures branding consistency, improves user experience across platforms, and aids with accessibility and SEO. For both large enterprises and small startups, the advantages of modular design systems make it an essential part of any modern software development process. The upfront cost is well worth the long-term savings in development costs and strategic agility. As interfaces become increasingly complex, organizations that embrace design systems will have a distinct competitive advantage.