Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System - daverupert.com

Burn baby burnout by Amy Hupe, content designer.

Here’s the transcript of a great talk by Amy on the realities of working on design systems.

Why design systems fail by Karen Vanhouten

1. No shared (and contextual) sense of purpose
2. Overbuilding, or scaling too early
3. Inability to make decisions and move forward quickly
4. Lack of clear ownership and dedicated resources
5. Lack of cultural alignment

The common thread among these issues is that none are related to technical or tooling decisions —or even to the components themselves.

“Design System Coverage,” an article from SuperFriendly

I completely agree with Dan that when it comes to design systems, completeness is an over-rated—and even counter-productive—goal:

Some organizations seem to hold up the ideal that, once a design system exists, everything in an interface can and should be built with it. Not only is that an unrealistic goal for most enterprises, but it can often be a toxic mindset that anything less than 100% coverage is misuse of a design system at best or utter failure at worst.

The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system • Robin Rendle

I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:

If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.

Why you should prioritise quality over speed in design systems by Amy Hupe, content designer.

Speed for the sake of speed means nothing. If our design systems don’t ultimately lead to better quality experiences, we’re doing it wrong.

When we rush to release one-size-fits-all components, without doing the work to understand different contexts before curating and consolidating solutions, we sacrifice quality at the hands of speed.

The irony? In the long run, this will slow us down. We end up having to undo the work we’ve done to fix the problems we’ve created.

Ultimately, when we prioritise speed over quality, we end up with neither.