{"id":1248,"date":"2020-02-07T15:49:13","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T13:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.neovita.com\/thoughts\/?p=1248"},"modified":"2020-03-12T21:53:31","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T19:53:31","slug":"evangelism-vs-design-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oninteractions.com\/thoughts\/evangelism-vs-design-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"You can do better than to create a design\u00a0system"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Design systems<\/a> are All The Rage<\/em> these days. Quite a few job ads<\/a> are for teams that work on design systems. The systems are fawned over on Medium<\/a> and in Sidebar<\/a>. At the same time, critique<\/a> is starting to pop up. Now I want to add some rants to that critique. But I also suggest a bunch of better solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s a design system supposed to do?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Design systems have raisons d\u2019\u00eatre such as documenting best practices<\/a>. And yeah, we clearly should never design a credit card payment form ever again, and rather just use what has already been proven to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, the main purposes of a design system often seem to be to unify<\/em> the visuals, interactions, motions and sounds of a set of digital products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second purpose is to make it possible for those designers who create visuals, motions, sounds and interactions to do more meaningful work by having common use cases already covered<\/em> by the design system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developers should also use the pre-cooked code<\/em> in the design systems to build their interfaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these amount to centralization, under the guise of efficiency and \u201cmaking it easier for the user to understand the interface\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To centralize or not?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Centralization is really at odds with contemporary product development. Marty Cagan et al prescribe empowered product teams<\/a> as the gold standard for innovative product creation. In such teams the important choices are made by the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time it can feel important for a central team to get each product team to follow guidelines, to do some things in a certain way. That might be good for the company for various reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How might we resolve this conflict?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As a person who subscribe to the philosophy of design<\/a> I always recommend coming up with many ways to create change, and to then choose the best option(s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the change a group want to enable is to get product teams to do things in certain ways, we can get that to happen in maaany ways:<\/p>\n\n\n\n