Design System
Design has always been largely about systems, and how to create products in a scalable and repeatable way. These systems enable us to manage the chaos and create better products. A unified design system is essential to building better and faster; better because a cohesive experience is more easily understood by our users, and faster because it gives us a common language to work with.
Project Challanges
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Design debt is made up of an overabundance of non-reusable and inconsistent styles
and conventions and the interest is the impossible task of maintaining them. Over time, the accumulation of this debt becomes a great weight that slows growth.
Surgere, the company I created the design system for had about a decade worth of design debt pilled into their product suite.
My first order of business was to dive in and perform a gap analysis of the existing products to gain a base-level understanding of the design debt.
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Standardized components used consistently and repetitively create a more predictable and easy-to-understand application.
Standardized components also allow designers to spend less time focused on style and more time developing a better user experience.
As I was performing my design gap analysis, I noticed a lack of component standardization from product to product, and even within a single product.
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Surgere had recently undergone a rebranding process, led by their internal marketing team working with an outside agency.
I wanted to ensure there was solid brand consistency and representation between any external marketing and internal products being built moving forward. Understanding that
The biggest hurdle within this process was not creating the components themselves but selling the idea internally that this product should exist.
The idea that we would spend time and resources building something that wasn’t directly serving our customers wasn’t a very attractive proposal at first.
After demonstrating the value a design system can provide (managing design debt, having one source of design truth, speed improvements…) I was able to get the internal buy-in to begin the project.
