Building Blocks of a Design System | Reusser Design
By: Reusser Design
Tags: Design System, Web Design, Ux Designer, UX, UX Design

Investing in a design system can elevate your brand and help you achieve a more efficient workflow, stronger brand cohesion, and cross-discipline collaboration.

Build digital products with ease

So, you’re ready to pull the trigger on the next big digital product.

Maybe your company publishes several digital products. Designers, developers, and strategists have spent countless hours pouring over designs and planning next steps. Then, it hits you … the memory of the painstaking process it was pulling all the pieces together and communicating with the team in order to roll out a successful product. It’s pretty easy to pinpoint most of the problem areas: collaboration, consistency, communication.

If only there were a solution to roll out new digital products in a way that made cross-team collaboration easy while maintaining the brand guidelines and consistency you worked so hard to create.

What is a Design System?

Design systems are not a new concept. Companies of all sizes have invested in design systems because they see the need to collaborate and deliver products quickly while maintaining consistency in brand guidelines. Companies like Shopify, AirBnb, MailChimp, Invision, and SalesForce find value in using a design system because the initial upfront investment outweighs the resources spent on the back end.

New to the concept of a design system? Let’s quickly explain …

A design system is a collection of design elements that can be combined and reused to build multiple digital products.

Think of it as a hub of information used to deliver multiple products that teams can access when developing a new product. One of the main goals is to have a single source of truth that various teams can access in order to maintain design integrity.

Must-Know Items Before Building a Design System

We are not here to talk about what a design system is as much as we want to discuss the building blocks of a design system. The internet is full of great articles on design systems. In fact, we delivered our own article defining a design system and detailed how it’s different from a standard style guide. In this article, we want to discuss some key building blocks needed before you start down the path of offering a design system to your team. We all know planning is an important part to any project-that’s why our team has spent countless hours refining the building blocks needed in order to create the roadmap to a successful design system.

Building Block #1: Consumer Behavior

One important aspect of building a successful design system is understanding consumer behavior within your existing digital experiences. With the help of analytics software (and there are several to choose from), we look at what a user is doing and translate why they chose a specific path. It’s important to gain a better understanding of your consumer’s overall journey. Why do analytics matter when we’re talking about a design system? You want to know what your consumer is doing so your team can quickly prototype digital experiences that will meet your consumers unique needs.

Once you have a good idea of who is using your site and how they’re using the site, you can begin defining key personas so we can create an experience catered to the end user.

A persona is a fictional customer created from known data. We like to say “putting a face to our customer”. Personas represent a specific user type that might visit the digital experience.

With a defined audience, you can begin building user journeys based on those personas. Understanding consumer behavior, developing personas and creating user-based mapping are essential components when thinking about a design system. These elements enable you to build experiences that are based on how users are actually using your site or app rather than on how you think they are using it.

Building Block #2: Brand Consistency

When many companies hear the word “brand” they often think of a logo or color palette. Although those brand identity pieces are important to effective branding, those elements aren’t your entire brand. You might be thinking, “How does that impact a design system?” One of the major blocks of a design system is brand consistency. With a design system, you have the ability to house all the design components that make up your brand in one central location. Understanding your brand begins by creating or collecting all the styling related to your brand and developing cohesive brand guidelines.

Brand identity and consistency goes beyond maintaining logo integrity-it expands into layout, components, type treatment, styling, imagery. If your company struggles with brand consistency, this is a good opportunity to invest into developing brand guidelines. Well-defined brand standards leads to a design system that will ensure brand continuity across multiple teams and multiple digital products.

Block #3: Design Patterns

Once you’ve defined your brand standards, you can begin creating an interface inventory. An interface inventory is a collection of UI/UX elements that give a clear picture of the overall digital experience. The inventory does a few things:

Creates a record of all the design elements used in your digital experience

Reveals all the design components needed to create design patterns

Reveals content patterns you will use later on in your design system

Sheds light on design and brand inconsistencies

Once you have a complete inventory of the design components, you can begin establishing the reusable design patterns that will be used in your design system. The best part of having an interface inventory-you now have the proof you need so you can go to your boss and say, “See, this is why we need a design system!”

There are many ways to create an interface inventory. Note: there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ method here. The main goal is to create an organized set of design elements. When we say “organized”, we mean it’s a good idea to organize the elements into sections that best describe its function. Brad Frost, speaker, designer, and author of Atomic Design made an easy-to-use template for creating an interface inventory. You can download it and customize it to fit your unique needs. All sections may not apply to your scenario-you may also see the need to add more sections-but it’s a great start.

Block #4: Content Patterns

As you begin gaining insight into consumer behavior, defining your brand, developing personas and journey mapping, it’s time to look at another critical building block of a design system-content. We all know content is king, and it certainly remains true in this scenario. Evaluating your content is an important part of developing an effective design system. As you evaluate content, you will begin to see content patterns arise. These patterns will be used to support all of your digital products. There are two main goals in this phase:

Know how much content you have and how it’s being consumed Make sense of the type of content you have so you can begin creating content patterns that will be used within your design system

Before you can begin thinking about content patterns, you have to go through a content audit. It’s a tedious process, yet critical to the overall success of the design system. It’s important to get a sense of what content you are serving to your audience. How is it organized? How are users consuming your content? How much content does your company have? These are all great questions you should ask when making sense of your content.

What’s Next?

We looked at some important building blocks of a design system: consumer behavior, brand consistency, design patterns and content patterns. But, why should your company consider a design system? In short, the amount of time and resources a company spends developing a design system is minimal compared to the resources they can spend trying to maintain consistency and minify design and development resources later on. Design systems play an integral role for companies who create multiple digital products.

Keep an eye out for more design system articles coming soon. If we can answer any questions, we’d love to help. Maybe your company needs to invest into an audit—we’d love to have a conversation!