Patterns Day 2019 - Alla Kholmatova

Making Impact With Design Systems

In their presentation at Patterns Day 2019, Alla discussed getting buy-in for your Design System from teams and leadership.

Why should our teams and leadership believe in Design Systems?

• Revenue

• Brand and UX improvements

• Efficiency

  Revenue

  Can consistency enabled by a design system, help improve conversions?

  • 2018, Alla managed to test if the consistency of Bulb’s site improved revenue.

  • They had to make sure conversion wasn’t hampered by changes.

  • They didn’t want to skew the results of the joining path by redesigning the sign up path.

  • They used the design system to update colours, and typography.

  • The results was 0.17% in favour of the using the design system.

  • “negligible really”.

    Are there other ways to improve revenue?

    • Design Systems can support experimentation and growth.
    • Mailchimp had a dramatic style change in 2018, base upon the original style guide.
    • “We parter with Growth to facility experimentation and testing of new patterns” - Alex Lehner, Mailchimp.
    • At Pinterest, a new element must out perform and existing element to be included.
    • Pattern experiments are unique to your system.
    • At Gov.uk they experimented with the progress indicator, without the indicator they time it took to complete a task didn’t change, so they removed the indicator.
    • At Habito, they found the form worked better, with a quicker progression with a progress indicator.
    • A pattern can work differently for different teams and products.

    UX and Brand

    • Often we talk about how Design Systems make things cohesive.

    • The term cohesive is something Alla hears a lot.

    • “User experience often suffers not because of poor consistency but confusing information architecture and content design.”

    • “Design Systems can help implement and reinforce a visual brand.”

    • GDS is a good example of this. Before the .gov.uk design system, there were 600-700 different UK government websites.

    • “People didn’t really know if they were on an official government website” - Tim Paul.

    • Whatever the reason, there needs to be organisational buy-in.

    • There needs to clarity on what the brand is.

      To work out what your brand is, you need clarity. To do this, you can:

      • purpose and values of the brand Design principles

      • Main screen design using new brand. Brand in context

      • Which then leads to new design patterns and documentation.

        Efficiency

        • The top ‘key point’ of selling a Design System.

        • Marvel have a well established Design System

        • “We haven’t used our design system in the last year. We just needed to ship things really fast.” - Yavor Punchev, Marvel App

        • If a point of design systems is efficiency, why did this happen?

        • Work out what you need to invest time in to make things efficient.

        • Investing in form patterns, it allowed Bulb to save 50% of front-end time working on pages that needed forms.

        • FutureLearn, on the other hand, only has one or two forms, so investing the same time on form patterns would not be an efficient use of time.

        • A Design System needs to adopt through it’s product life cycle.

        • Not only looking at the growth and maturity uses.

        • Technology plays a very big part in keeping your Design System efficient

        • “Without React working on the design system alway felt like an uphill struggle.” - Jay Begum, FutureLearn.

          Being strategic in what parts you invest in and when can make a really impact on your Design System.

          “There needs to be a bigger goal, beyond the design system, for the system to have an impact.” - Alla

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