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How to Measure Design System Adoption

Automated tracking of token and component adoption

Steve Dennis
UX Collective
8 min readSep 25, 2022
A graphic showing some dashboards that are tracking a variety of design system metrics.

Early on in Onfido’s design system journey all our data and metrics were manually collected. We were a scrappy team without dedicated resources, and we did what we could within those constraints.

The data we collected during this stage helped us to secure a budget and rebuild our design system to be better and more flexible. We had the bones of a great system that included design tokens, and around five high-quality components that we were convinced would be widely used if our product teams adopted them.

Each stage of design system maturity will have different metrics that make the most sense to track against your goals at the time. In this article, I’ll just be focussing on growing adoption.

Stage 1: Building version One (Release) Stage 2: Growing Adoption (Critical Mass Adoption) Stage 3: Surviving the Teenage Years(The organization values the system like an external product) Stage 4: Evolve a Healthy Product
Graphic from Design System Maturity Model by Sparkbox

Minimum viable integration

We started by having conversations with the three product teams we thought would get the most benefit from the system. The only blocker to adoption for them was the up-front effort to integrate the required libraries into their product. Once those libraries were in place, tokens or components…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Steve Dennis

Senior Design Manager @ Onfido, writing about design systems, product design, leadership, and tech @ clipcontent.substack.com.

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