The depth of conversations and knowledge sharing in the design system community is second to none, and we’re all the better for it. Yet some fundamental stuff still feels like it hasn’t moved on at all.

As practitioners to varying degrees, we want to get better results and to make better stuff. This is our craft and the space for exploration and maturity that’s within our control, looking around us and forward at how forms of AI might be a part of this.

This in some ways keeps us in a bit of a bubble, if we’re not careful. Design systems aren’t the end goal, they’re a means to solve some fairly fundamental challenges. It’s this deeper bit of homework I often feel is missing — what problems do we feel a design system might help us to solve?

While it’d be easy to run off the same list of proposed benefits a design system might bring, that’s not the answer. Why do you at your organisation have problems that this might in some way address? In the case of consistency — why aren’t you consistent today? Is it a communication issue? Is it around roles and responsibilities? Is it that a technical change might resolve this? Assuming a design system will naturally make everything better is one of many reasons why I’ve seen them fail.

Your design system may end up with some similar-looking components and other more tangible artefacts but the path you take to get there can often be more important than those end results. That line of questioning and research will often take us way outside of our comfort zones too — looking at the place we work through a new lens, and doing some digging around the challenges that currently exist.

There can also be a trap we fall into with enthusiastically selling in a design system with the commonly cited benefits. Your mileage will vary and some of that is all of the back story and context behind the creation of the system. Tying the goals of the design system to the actual challenges that the organisation faces both positions it clearly with tangible benefits that people experience that may in turn suggest measures of success.

Some of the generic benefits can be difficult to land as ‘more consistent’ can seem quite floaty and actually not that important, ‘scalable’ might not resonate, etc.

In this, we meet people who don’t care or don’t need to care about a design system — just that their actual problems are recognised and in some way can be addressed by this proposition. It’s not always about selling in a design system so much as reframing it by latching on to pain points and leading with that aspect through its formation.