State of UX in 2020
Invisible design systems
We see the term Design System everywhere: conferences, articles, tweets, courses, capabilities slides. While a design system is a powerful way to scale a product, our focus on its output (the pattern library itself), rather than outcome makes us miss the invisible value of its systematic approach.
A quick search for “design systems” on Google Trends shows that interest in this topic has been on the rise over the past few years. On Medium, a handful of new articles are published with that tag every single week. The topic has become such a buzzword that even a Twitter account was created this year to mock designers’ obsession with design systems.
It’s easy to appreciate design systems. From a user experience perspective, designing interfaces with common UX patterns creates familiarity for users, since they know what to expect from experience moments they regularly encounter in the product. From a technical perspective, reusable UI components can mean more efficiency, scalability, and less re-work for developers.
A design system is not (just) a UI library
The first image that comes to mind when one thinks about design systems is that of a component library: a repository of UI patterns such as buttons, dropdowns, and cards that designers and developers can easily copy and paste to speed up their work. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg: a design system has to take into consideration broader aspects of a company’s operations, including tooling, governance, people, accessibility standards, technology stack, and workflow.
When these broader aspects are not considered, companies end up with design libraries that are abandoned within a few months — which is why designers need to start thinking about design systems as a living organism that connects the whole organization.
Design system, design governance, and design library are three different projects with three different approaches. One won’t solve for all.
In an article where she coins the expression Invisible Design System, design systems advocate Jina Anne questions the necessity of having those public repositories as we evolve our practice: “As our design and engineering tools get closer and closer together, will we come to a point where we don’t need the website? Can our tools surface suggestions for better accessibility, localization, performance, and usability, because our design system is baked into the tools?”
A design system is a reflection of a company’s values
“Critically, a design system is about people: how they interact, how they understand one another, and how they work together to achieve a common goal. It’s made by people, used by people, and experienced by people. It’s challenged and shaped and broken by people. (…) Our role as a systems team turns from that of organizer and enforcer to that of anthropologist and researcher.” — Daniel Eden, Where We Can Go.
Before revisiting which color to use for calls-to-action, we first need to revisit the values our company holds.
The experiences enabled by a company reflect its values, both in terms of the specific service it provides, as well as its worldview. As designer Tatiana Mac explains in her talk Building Socially Inclusive Design Systems, without a clear intent and a clear awareness of our biases, the design systems we create perpetuate established patterns that exist in the world around us. If 83% of tech executives are white, and if the ratio between men and women is 4:1 in STEM, there is a high chance the design systems created by that group will exclude people who don’t share the same race, gender, sexual orientation, philosophy, socioeconomic status, language, nationality, and ability as them.
No wonder every gender dropdown starts with ”Male” — and in many cases excludes non-binary people. (Source: image from the Building Socially Inclusive Design Systems presentation by Tatiana Mac)
In 2020, we should be spending less energy in creating new components for our design system, and focus our attention in understanding the systems behind the design.
This article is part of our State of UX report: a holistic analysis of digital design as a discipline, and what to expect for the future.
