Design Systems London 2019 - James and James

15 November 2019

Design Systems are literally everywhere, and everyone seems to have one.
The benefits of Design Systems sounds great, but where do you start?
- A design system is a continuous approach not an end solution
There are two big questions to ask
- Do you need a Design System?
  - Don’t implement one because it is a big shiny buzzword
  - Work out what are the problems you re trying to solve by introducing one
- Are you ready for one?
  - How much resource is available,
  - What buy-in do you have
    - The business should know the benefits
    - The business should know the constraints
  - Having the Skills
    - great developers and designers
    - have documentation
    - DevOps
Poor ownership can lead to
- Disagreements over direction
- incorrect additions
- inconstant processes
A centralised ownership created a bottleneck
Treat it as an open source project so everyone can help with it. This leads to better components through shared knowledge and more usage because of the shared ownership
But you still need a small core ownership, with a design system council
- They have key responsibilities.
  - updates
  - roadmap
  - identify inconsistencies
Why Design Reviews?
- Where should the component be built?
- Are there existing components?
- More than one team that need similar components
Hold Knowledge sharing sessions.
- What we wish we’d known
  - Ensure organisational understanding
  - understand impact
  - understand bottlenecks of centralised teams