Design Systems and Their Role in Marketing
With each passing year, the number of companies in different sectors keep on growing, with this growth comes the need for companies to stand out amongst their competitors. This is usually done by them building up a distinct identity for themselves via the use of a design system.
Design System, what is it?
Design system is more than just what a company’s product looks like, it consumes the whole of the company such as the patterns and practices the company follows to set itself out amongst the crowd. With these patterns come certain standards that have to be met for the company to adhere to the system.
A design system is very important for a company to have, this is because it helps them stand out amongst the crowd and also helps in their scalability as they continue to grow bigger over the coming years. Another advantage of having a design system is that it helps the products of the company to be marketable on any platform.
Building a Design System
1) Set up a strong design team or hire a well reputed team
2) Set design principles as well as patterns for the team to follow
3) Fixate on a set of rules and standards that the team has to follow for all their projects
4) Always try and improve the design system by taking in feedback from the clients as well as the employees
5) Try integrating feedback on the system as forwarded by AI or Machine Learning
6) Build an interactive application after all the parameters are set to check for what can be improved
7) Fixate on certain profitable platforms for the application like desktop, mobile, IoT devices, and wearables.
Keeping track of the Return on Investment
The impact that design system causes on the company over a period of time can be hard to measure because of its abstract nature. Design systems are part of the products that the company releases and usually fall under the category of customer experience.
One of the ways to keep track of how a specific system has impacted the company is to keep track of the number of changes that have been made in the company application’s UI based code such as the CSS files over a long duration. If the change that has been made is improving the performance of the company and there are less changes being made in the future then it can be vouched for that the design system has a great impact.
Finally, the thing that confuses all companies is on how to scale up their design systems to match the growing performance of the company. To make a system scalable, a general rule of thumb is to keep it relatively basic and simplistic. The more complex a company’s design system is the more difficult it gets to scale up the system.
To end, when planning for a design system it is always necessary to keep in mind not only the company’s present situation but also what it will grow up to be.
