Workshop: how to define and measure the success of your design system?
This year, I’ve worked on several design systems and I’ve learned a lot about how to get started and the mistakes to avoid…Today, we’re going to talk about defining and measuring the success of your design system!
Goal
Define the main goals of your design system (internal and/or external goals) and then, find the key indicators that will help you to measure that success.
Timing: 2 hours
People you need to invite:
Stakeholders, managers, lead designers and lead developers.
1 facilitator. No more than 12 people.
Material needed
- A whiteboard
- Black markers
- Large sticky notes
- Stickers
- Pens & paper
Preparation
Before the workshop, run interviews and/or surveys in order to understand the actual needs and issues of your teams, as well as their main concerns regarding the design system.
Steps
- Introduction: remind the goals of this workshop and present the output of the interviews and surveys, showing the pain points of the teams and their expectations (20 min).
- Each participant writes down on sticky notes 3 or 4 goals for the system, by completing this sentence: “Our design system will be a success if we manage to…” (10 min).
- Gather everyone’s goals and consolidate them into broad categories (30 min).
- Each participant votes for the 3 categories that are the most important for him/her (10 min).
- Make 3 groups. Each group takes one of the selected categories and thinks about the different indicators that can be used, in order to measure its success (20 min).
- Restitution: each group presents the result of their discussions and the others add their ideas (30 min).
Examples
GOAL #1:
“Our design system will be a success if we manage to reduce development’s costs by 20% within a year.”
Indicators:
- Measure the time needed to build simple and complex components for one team.
- Measure how many occurrences of these components are used in different products, built by different teams.
- Compare it with the time needed to integrate a component within a project, using the design system.
- …
GOAL #2:
“Our design system will be a success if we manage to deliver a seamless and cohesive experience on every platform.”
Indicators:
- Make regular audits and interface inventories and count the numbers of similar components in order to check if the cohesiveness between products is improving.
- Count the numbers of design tokens used across the products in order to check what is shared across platforms.
- …
Tips
- Make sure everyone can speak, even the shyest ones.
- Think of qualitative indicators as much as quantitative ones.
- Do not forget to capture some data before starting your design system or it will be very difficult for you to show the progress.
To go further
- Regularly refer to all the goals of the system, even those that did not come out as priorities.
- Try to set accurate (but realistic) goals to achieve. For example: “we want to divide the onboarding time of a new designer by two”.
- Also, think about how you will capture data. With which tools? In which format (interview, tests, surveys, etc.)? And how will you present the results?
And by the way, we wrote a whole book on design systems that you can download on the link below:
