Design Systems as a business advantage and key to digital transformation

The ever-growing range of functions and the increased complexity of digital products require more structuring and management of all product components. During development, the focus is increasingly on the efficient and rapid implementation of changes, as well as a consistent user experience and clear brand identity. This is where the advantages of a design system come into play - because it is more than just a buzzword that you can read in every other article that deals with digital product development. But what exactly is a design system? What is it made of? For which use cases is it worth establishing a design system and which problems can it solve? These questions will be answered below.

Definition of a Design System

A design system is the central place where all visual assets are brought together and curated so that they can be used by designers and engineers alike. This includes all components relevant to a consistent design, such as color palettes, style guides, patterns and a component library. This not only determines what the final design should look like, but also the principles according to which it will be implemented.

Meaningful use and properties of a Design System

The first question that arises: Will establishing a design system really make a difference for me and my product/range of products? The answer can be determined by one factor in particular: the complexity of the product. If it is a low-complexity product, such as a website that only uses a few components that do not need to be reused elsewhere or constantly adapted, a design system does not necessarily make sense.
The reason for this are the resources that are required for the initial creation of a design system. Building a system and documenting all its components in such a way that it can then be used and consistently developed further by designers and engineers requires time, know-how and therefore also financial resources. An investment that doesn’t pay off for every product.
We recommend the use of a design system for rather complex products or processes to be depicted, that also require many different components. The systematic management and expansion of an extensive component library offers many advantages for products that are created using Lean Agile methods - i.e. if needs-adaptive changes need to be made to the product quickly and easily. Also, a design system can be the central reference point – the 'single source of truth' – for all design elements for several products at the same time. It helps creating a consistent design and user experience across products and gives them their own visual identity.

Realization of Business Goals

Besides the complexity of the product playing a decisive role in whether a company needs a design system or not, there are further challenges that can be solved by implementing a design system:

• Easily expand digital products

• Create recognition and solve a lack of trust in the products

• Increase user-friendliness

• Increase efficiency

• Increase effectiveness

The following properties give the design system the opportunity to implement the aspects mentioned above:

Uniform design: A design system provides uniform design elements such as colors, fonts, icons and layouts to ensure a consistent look across all products.

Modularity: Design systems are constructed modularly. They are made up of reusable components that can be easily combined and customized to support different applications.

Consistent brand identity: A design system helps maintain a consistent brand identity by providing design guidelines and standards that ensure the brand's look and feel are maintained across all applications.

Scalability: A design system is scalable and can grow as a company or product line grows, adding new components and guidelines and updating existing ones.

Efficiency: By reusing design elements and standards, a design system can increase efficiency in the design process by shortening the time to develop new products and reducing the need for redundant work.

Documentation and training: A design system usually includes detailed documentation and training materials that help designers and engineers understand the system and work effectively with it.

Flexibility and adaptability: Although a design system provides consistent guidelines, it also allows for flexibility and customization to meet the specific needs of different products and use cases.

Collaboration: A design system promotes collaboration between different teams by providing a common design language and infrastructure that allows teams to collaborate efficiently and share resources.

How can Design Systems help to extend digital products?

The “extension of a digital product” refers to the development or integration of new functions, modules or components into an existing digital product. These enhancements may serve to improve the functionality of the product, to meet new usage requirements, to optimize the user experience or to adapt the product to changing market requirements.

Why it is important to handle extension efficiently

Efficient extension allows development time and resources to be saved as it results in faster implementation of new features or improvements. This makes it easier to scale the digital product over time and to adapt to changing user needs without compromising stability or performance. This way, companies can increase their competitiveness by always offering their customers current and innovative products.

What problems can inefficient extension cause?

Inefficient extension can lead to technical debt, which in the long term can slow down development and affect product maintainability. Through efficient handling, such technical debt can be avoided or minimized.
If you want to expand a complex digital product or implement changes across multiple products without a central location for all visual decisions, you invest a disproportionate amount of time in communication between designers and engineers. All design decisions made must be implemented individually at each point, a lot of work goes into repetitive steps, misunderstandings quickly arise and too much inefficiently used working time occurs.

Design System as a solution

A well-structured and consistently designed design system enables the central management of all design-relevant assets - simultaneously across multiple products. Cross-product changes can therefore be carried out extremely quickly and easily - and with little personnel effort. When expanding the functionality of a digital product, the product team can focus more on discovering new features and an optimized user experience and less on developing standard components. So the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented constantly. At the same time, a design system as a "single source of truth" reduces the handover effort in cross-functional teams between design and engineering. The time for the usual process of discovery - new design / change - hand over - implementation is therefore maximally shortened and effective. The use of design tokens acts as an additional booster, because only individual values need to be changed to implement improvements. The scaling of products managed via a design system can be done with ease and can also be applied to white label product solutions where flexible theming is planned from the start.