A Guide to Design System IDEA THEOREM
One of the challenges as your product scales is you work towards providing a standardized experience to your users. Your users start to expect certain ways that your product would behave even as you add new features to it. This is where Design System comes in to help you build the guideline that can be followed by developers and designers when building the product. One of the common misconceptions is that the: The Design System is only for designers – the Style Guide The Design System is only for developers – the Pattern Code Library
INTRODUCTION
What is a Design System? The Design System is a unique guideline that follows the brand or company design style. Also, it sets minimum rules in order to maintain brand identity. It contains visual design elements as well as a pattern library that provides the standard of components that designers and developers use while they design and develop the product respectively. The main goal of having the Design System is to increase the efficiency of the project, bring in standardization and maintain brand identity.
Why is the Design System important? As the product grows, more designers and developers will be added to the team. As every new hire comes, new ideas, new patterns, new typography comes into play. This creates chaos. The system will help stop that chaos and confusion. It brings consistency and increases the speed of product development. A Design System can be very useful for any organization big or small. Building a Design System takes time & effort, so here are some benefits:
01
Consistency
02
Scalability
03
Communication
04
Enhance User Experience
What does a Design System consist of?
Before creating the actual design system, designers should ask themselves who will use it and how they will use it. Once they define the answer to those questions, they can start to consider where to start for the design system and what to put in it. Design Principle It helps capture what good design means to the company and helps the team make meaningful decisions based on these principles.
Style Guide
UI Kit UI Kit consists of UI elements that are like LEGO blocks. They are built once and reused throughout the product by the designer to create their design.
Master Control Library
The Design System must define the standard on how to use each element. It should contain what to do and not do with elements and also how to combine elements together so that designers can accurately deliver the desired product experience.
Accessibility Guidelines The Design System should clearly showcase the accessibility of the product. It should be able to define colour contrast, keyboard focus and navigation and screen readers effectively.
Using the UI Kit, developers are able to add code and behaviour to each of the UI elements. Resulting in responsive and accessible code based components which can be reusable throughout the platform.
What Next Idea Theorem is a Toronto based UI UX Agency. We create simple and usable products for web and mobile. Our human-centred design approach lets us understand your customers, identify their pain points & deliver solutions that enhance their experience with your brand. Contact Us if you have any questions and we will be happy to help you.
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