A design system without clear governance is like a messy desk, things get lost, and it’s hard to find what you need. How does your team ensure smooth coordination when proposing new components? Do you have a system for that, or do you sometimes feel like it’s a bit of a free-for-all?
Design system governance process is one of the most important ingredients of a healthy design system. Brad Frost summarises the essentials of organizing a robust design governance process (https://lnkd.in/dyRWiJrz)
5 Signs that you need a better governance process:
✔ Team members can’t find a component that does what they need. There is no central source of truth for components.
✔ A design system component/pattern that they want to use does not fully satisfy their needs (i.e., 80% but not 100% fulfills all their requirements)
✔ Teams use different versions of components in different products. As a result, the system cannot scale effectively to accommodate new products, teams, or organizational changes.
✔ Teams bypass the design system, creating custom solutions instead. As a result, the design system contains multiple components that serve the same purpose.
✔ There is no clear process for proposing or implementing changes, resulting in a chaotic flow of contributions.
📘 What does a healthy design system process look like?
Step 1️⃣: Product teams use the design system to design and build new work. A design system is a tool that the team uses in their daily work to build a design.
Step 2️⃣: When the team wants to design a new component/pattern, the first thing it does is determine whether or not new work needs to happen (i.e., it is possible to reuse existing components or it should be a brand new component).
Step 3️⃣: If new work is needed, is it a snowflake or part of the design system? A “snowflake” is a one-off component that only really to one specific use case. Part of the design system is a component that is part of library that serves all products.
Step 4️⃣: Prototype initial concept. The team produces the initial concepts for the work.
Step 5️⃣: Review the initial concept. Review the concept with an individual or teams who govern the design system and determine whether the concept meets all requirements. A robust design system should have high-level principles and standards that a new component should comply with, such as consistency and scalability. If the new component fails to comply with requirements, it should be redesigned.
Step 6️⃣: Formal design system design/dev & testing process. Includes functional, accessibility, cross-browser testing, etc.
Step 7️⃣: Documentation & stage ready-for-release. The component should be documented on the style guide website, code and API documentation.
Step 8️⃣: Product team adoption. The product team pulls the new version of the design system (that features a new component/pattern) into their application environment and tests the new work.
📕 Great examples of design system contribution & governance processes: https://lnkd.in/dmXGWz55
🖼️ Proposing a new component to Canonica’s Vanilla design system
#designsystem #design #UX #UI #uidesign
Proposing a new component to design system. Image by Canonical Vanilla