Navigating Adoption: Fundamentals of Adopting Design Systems
In the first blog of the Navigating Adoption series, learn about the importance of design system adoption, its objectives, and aligning them with your audience.
Design systems have become essential to modern product development, streamlining the design process and ensuring consistency across different teams. But a design system is only helpful if people use it. In this blog post, we will explore the fundamentals of design system adoption, including its importance, different levels of adoption, objectives, and aligning these objectives with the target audience.
What is design system adoption?
Adoption, in the context of design systems, refers to the process of integrating a design system into an organization's workflow and culture. This includes not only the technical implementation of the design system but also the acceptance and utilization of the system by designers, developers, and other stakeholders.
Objectives of a design system
Before we get into why adoption is so important, it's helpful to remember what design systems set out to do — these include:
- Streamlining the design process by providing reusable components and patterns
- Ensuring consistency in the visual language and user experience across products and platforms
- Facilitating collaboration between designers, developers, and other stakeholders
- Reducing design debt and maintenance costs by providing a single source of truth for design decisions.
With these objectives in mind, you can probably already tell how in order to achieve these goals, your design system needs to be adopted by its users. Let's take a closer look.
The importance of adoption in design systems
Adoption is crucial for design systems because it determines the success and effectiveness of the system.
Think about a situation where a designer has made sure to update the design system with the latest iteration of a component that is ready to be implemented in the product. While a developer on the same team is not as keen on using a design system and instead goes directly to the design team looking for the latest iteration of the component. If your goal is to streamline the process with the design system, it's easy to imagine not having everyone adopt can put bring that process to a halt.
Imagine another situation where some designers fully use the design system as the final source of truth while others keep their designs in their Figma libraries and only update when specifically asked to. Now a developer unknowingly implements all the latest versions in the design system. This means they miss most of the latest updates that some designers had in Figma. A typical situation like this would take a toll on the final product's consistency and incur more debt to maintain and fix the issue.
These are two very basic examples that could happen to any team. And these are small-scale examples, but in the case of a larger scale dealing with multiple products and brands, these issues would only grow exponentially. A design system's effectiveness is directly tied to how many people adopt it.
A well-adopted design system can lead to improved collaboration, faster cycles, better consistency, and reduced maintenance costs. On the other hand, a poorly adopted design system can result in wasted resources, a poorer final product, and frustration among team members.
Different levels of adoption and their impact
Adoption can still mean different things to different teams, and there are levels to it. For a team to improve its adoption levels, it's worth keeping them in mind.
- Awareness: Team members know of the design system but may not use it consistently. This level of adoption can lead to occasional use of the system, but it may not yet significantly impact the overall workflow.
- Partial adoption: The design system is used by some team members or for specific projects. This level of adoption can result in improved collaboration and consistency for those projects, but the system's full benefits may not be realized.
- Full adoption: The design system is fully integrated into the organization's workflow and culture, with all team members using it consistently. This level of adoption allows the organization to reap the full benefits of the design system, including improved efficiency, consistency, and collaboration.
Another level of adoption depends on your design system's governing model if your design system is open to contributions from its users. The highest level of adoption is for your team to become active contributors and add to the design system, not just consume it. Getting to full adoption can be tricky, but an important first step is understanding your audience.
Aligning design system objectives with your audience
Implementing a design system means changing how your organization works, collaborates, and builds products. The stakeholders or team bringing this change forward can identify issues and how a design system might improve their work. But at the end of the day, people don't like changing how they work.
A large part of increasing adoption is change management. Getting people on board is difficult, especially at the beginning, but here are some tips to get there:
- Understand the pain points and challenges designers, developers, and other stakeholders face and clearly communicate how the design system would help solve these issues
- Tailor the design system's components, patterns, and documentation to address these pain points and challenges
- Provide training and support to help team members effectively use the design system
- Set up consistent check-ins and office hours to help people integrate smoothly
- Continuously iterate and improve the design system based on feedback from the target audience.
The path to successful design system integration
Design system adoption is a critical factor in determining the success and effectiveness of a design system. By understanding the objectives of a design system, the importance of adoption, different levels of adoption, and aligning the design system's objectives with the target audience, organizations can ensure that their design systems deliver the desired benefits and contribute to a more efficient and consistent product development process.
Now that we have covered the fundamentals of adoption, our next article in the series will take a deeper look at the challenges with adoption and how to overcome them.
