- No shared (and contextual) sense of purpose
- Overbuilding, or scaling too early
- Inability to make decisions and move forward quickly
- Lack of clear ownership and dedicated resources
- Lack of cultural alignment
The common thread among these issues is that none are related to technical or tooling decisions —or even to the components themselves.
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).
This is true of software, networks, and organisations.
When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.
Every day, a new marketing email, Medium post, or VC who will leave Twitter when they’re cold in a body bag tells us that machine learning (ML, which they call AI because it sounds more expensive) is going to change the way we work. Doesn’t really matter what your job is. ML is going to read, write, code, and paint for us.
Naturally, the excitement around ML has found its way into the design systems community. There’s an apparent natural synergy between ML and design systems. Design systems practitioners are tantalized by the promise of even greater efficiency and scale. We wish a machine would write our docs for us.
We are all, every single one of us, huge fucking nerds.
Here’s an aggregator of components from multiple design systems.
Ethan highlights a classic case of the McNamara Fallacy—measuring adoption of design system components.
This is handy—a collection of font stacks using system fonts. You can see which ones are currently installed on your machine too.
The most performant web font is no web font.
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
Design systems as codified constraints.
This free online event is happening at 7pm UK time this evening. I saw Ben give a talk on this at Clarity, and it was excellent. There was a lot of crossover with what I’ve been trying to get at with the intersection of declarative design and culture, except Ben expresses it far more clearly than me. The bastard.
If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It’s time for you to look at your design system from a different angle.
The primary goals of this strategy are to inform decision-making and enhance the success of accessibility-related activities within the GOV.UK Design System team.
Interestingly, accessibility concerns are put into two categories: theoretical and evidenced (with the evidenced concerns being prioritised):
- Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
- Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.
A library of UX components is one common part of a design system, but the system itself is something bigger. A good system is also a shared set of strategies for solving visual and interactive communication challenges, a playbook rather than a script.
I like this way of putting it:
The problem is that treating a design system as a pantry full of widgets is, in and of itself, a failure of both craft and imagination. Think of it like a language: if a writer’s only engagement with it is grabbing words from the dictionary and heaping them together until “message” is achieved, things are going to suck. Language is more than a bag of words.
I often use the word quality when referring to apps, products and services I hold in a high regard but another word that often comes up in this context is craft. Craft, as in something that is handcrafted where something someone spent a lot of time on and maybe even embedded their own personal touches and personality in it. Often something handcrafted feels more premium.
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
I wrote a while back about descriptive and prescriptive design systems—and a follow-up post—but I didn’t realise there was such a thing as descriptive and prescriptive engineering.
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
As you can probably tell from the stuff I’ve been linking to today and today’s Clearleft newsletter, I’ve got design systems on my mind.
What I like about design systems is they encourage systems thinking …in theory. I mean, it’s right there in the name, right? But in practice I see design sytems focusing on the opposite of systems thinking: analytical thinking.
Okay, I realise that’s a gross oversimplification of both systems and thinking and analytical thinking, but why stop now?
Analytical thinking is all about breaking a big thing down into its constituent parts. By examining the individual parts you gain an understanding of the whole.
This is a great approach to understanding the world, particularly when it comes to phenonema that work the same everywhere in the universe. But it doesn’t work so well with messy phenonema like, say, people doing things together.
Systems thinking takes the opposite approach. You look at the bigger picture with the understanding that the individual parts are all interconnected somehow and can’t really be viewed in isolation.
To put it very bluntly, analytical thinking is about zooming in whereas systems thinking is about zooming out.
When it comes to design systems—or design in general—you need to have a mix of both.
If you neglect the analytical thinking, you may end up with a design system that has well-documented processes for how it operates, but is lacking the individual components.
If you neglect the systems thinking, you may end up with a design system that’s a collection of components, but with no understanding of how they’re supposed to work together.
Ideally, you want a good mix of both.
But I’ve got to be honest: if I had to err on one side more than the other, I think I’d rather have less analytical thinking and more systems thinking.
Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.
This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power via several essential principles…
I’ll be adding those principles to my collection.
I like this approach to offering a design system. It seems less prescriptive than many:
Designed not as a rule set, but rather a toolbox, the Data Design Language includes a chart library, design guidelines, colour and typographic style specifications with usability guidance for internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y), all reflecting our data design principles.
This is a great analysis by Amy of the conflicting priorities tugging at design systems.
No matter how hard we work to foster these socialist ideals, like community, collaboration, and contribution, it feels as though we’re always being dragged to a default culture of individualism.