Archive: May 19th, 2020

Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System - daverupert.com

Five moments in the lifecycle of a design system. They grow up so fast!

1. Formation of the Design System Team
2. First Page Shipped
3. Consumable Outside the Main Product
4. First Non-System Team Consumer
5. First Breaking Change

Dave makes the observation that design systems are less like open source software and more like enterprise software—software you didn’t choose to use:

Often, in my experience, for an internal Design System to have widespread adoption it requires a literal executive mandate from the top floor of the building.

Also: apparently design systems have achieved personhood now and we’re capitalising them as proper names. First name Design, last name System.

“Please, call me Design. Mr. System was my father.”

Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne

• Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
• Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
• Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out