Why a Design System accelerates Software Design and Development

Using a design system enables a consistent brand presentation across all channels, which is a significant challenge without a design system, especially with different products and separate teams. A design system enables a consistent visual and functional representation at every touch point with the customer. After a single experience with one of the company's products, the customer is thus able to use a still unfamiliar product intuitively right from the beginning, since he recognizes the UI elements and already knows how to use them.

Design systems facilitate collaboration and communication through a common vocabulary and understanding of the elements included in the system. Designers and developers often use different terminology, which can lead to misunderstandings or lengthy explanations. It is even more difficult for team members who have little or no familiarity with the terminology of both departments. This is where the elements and design guidelines defined in the design system come in handy. All team members have the same understanding when talking about an "Accordion" or the design token "green-800" or "paragraph-1". By the way, if you don't know what I'm talking about here, I recommend the following article "How to create a Design System for a Software, App or Website".

Of course, design systems are not meant to replace communication and it is very important to get understanding about the work of other departments, it is just used to avoid mistakes and to optimize collaboration.

The defined elements and design guidelines within the design system allow designers and developers to focus on the complex and essential work of designing or developing interfaces. They are not always confronted with questions of how, for example, a button looks or behaves in its various states (Default, Hover, Disabled, Focus, Loading, ...), or what colors or spacing to use, because all these properties are already defined in the design system.

With a design system, it's more about using these elements and combining them into an interface according to the guidelines and in consideration of the requirements and needs of all stakeholders.

In addition to design tokens and components, design patterns also belong in a design system. These are structures that have already been successfully established for solving certain problems when using an interface.

In addition to known patterns, patterns can also be developed for individual problems. Proven and validated patterns then become part of the design system and can be quickly applied elsewhere if the problem reoccurs. This reduces the effort for design, usability testing, development and QA significantly.

A design system is a central library, changes to the elements included in the system can be quickly applied to all products in the ecosystem. The atomic design methodology illustrates this principle very well. Atomic design aims to develop user interfaces with components that build on each other hierarchically, similar to chemical elements. In a nutshell, all more complex components are made up of smaller components and design tokens. This has the advantage that changes to components or design tokens affect all interfaces developed with them and time-consuming manual adjustments are avoided.

The design system can serve not only as a tool, but also to document the visual corporate communication and as a training medium for employees.

Even the best designers need documentation of the design elements and guidelines in order to use them in everyday life and thus ensure consistent visual corporate communication.

New employees can be onboarded much more quickly and effectively with a properly prepared and documented design system. And even for existing employees it is an important source for refreshing and consolidating their knowledge.