How to Measure the Impact of a Design System?

Why is it important to create and measure the impact of a Design System?

The Value of Creating a Design System

A Design System is a managed source of truth for product design, processes, and product governance. It acts as a reference library, encompassing words, guidelines, style guides, and visual language. The purpose of a Design System is to centralize this information in one place. It is primarily used by Designers and Developers to ensure the implementation of a cost-effective customer experience.

Why Measure it?

As passionate professionals, we all believe that our work has an impact. However, measuring this impact, demonstrating its relationship with business growth, or its benefits to other departments or the digital product/service itself, is not always easy.

By demonstrating this impact, Digital Design professionals undoubtedly contribute to improving the digital product/service and promote the awareness of their discipline within the organization.

What Makes an Effective Design System?

• A Design System is a source of synchronized elements between design resources and code.
• It provides a process and governance to guide change and experimentation.
• It requires responsibility and rigor to ensure efficient design and code.
• It demands buy-in from engineering and design: engineers and designers use systematized components whenever possible. It has full executive support and organizational alignment.

So far, is it clear, or did I lose you? By the way, if you’d like to add points to this list or share your perspective, feel free to comment and engage with other readers.

Now, let’s delve into the topic at hand without further ado.

How to Measure the Impact of a Design System?

As you can imagine, there are various measurement techniques available. And like there’s no magic recipe (not even here), I’ve compiled a summary of proven techniques that have worked for the Head of Design professionals I’ve encountered.

I suggest measuring the impact of your Design System through two approaches: subjective measures and objective measures.

Subjective Measures

This section will be relatively brief as it is relatively straightforward.

Through qualitative and quantitative surveys (a delight for UX researchers) conducted with end users and internal teams, we can understand what might change the opinions of our stakeholders.

For internal teams, we can conduct surveys to improve workflows and adoption. We could ask questions such as:

• How frequently do you use the Design System?
• Existing Design System: What improvements would you like to see in the current Design System? Does the Design System enhance your workflow on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree)?
• Design System not yet implemented: Have you ever worked with a Design System? If yes, what were the good and bad practices you experienced? What do you expect from a Design System today?

For end users, we can consider creating a Net Promoter Score (NPS for short). This would allow us to gather ratings (hopefully high) and feedback (positive, if possible), indicating strong user confidence in our products.

From the end user’s perspective, they will experience an improvement in their overall experience.

Objective Measures

For many of us, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are already part of our daily routine. It’s no secret that we cannot achieve good design without user data. The same logic applies to measuring the impact of a Design System. And these numbers speak volumes to stakeholders.

To calculate the impact of a Design System on end users, we can easily measure page load times or accessibility.

While creating a Design System, the team works towards unifying the code, right? In this context, we can also look at how many lines of code have been removed or relocated.

For internal teams, we can rely on our previous surveys and measure the adoption of our Design System (are they using it more than before?).

🧐 Use case

Sean Rice and Jordan Reed from Keap wanted a way to understand which projects require cleanup work, which projects might need new components, and get an overall overview of design adoption. They created an internal tool to monitor the usage of the Design System in Sketch, leveraging node-sketch.

Not only did this help understand adoption from a data perspective, but it also enabled the team to understand areas for improvement and workflow issues better.

The Keap team recently created an open-source tool, Sleuth for Sketch, to allow others to measure the coverage of the Design System in their design files.

Okay, so what’s the impact? 👊

Whether we work in a startup or a large company, the Design System can solve prevalent business problems.

While a Design System may not make sense for every company, here are some of the main issues that implementing a Design System can help address:

• Consistency and attractiveness of our products
• Design and engineering time and budget
• Product quality and bugs

Often, components of a new product are built as unique solutions, leading to fragmented approaches in product construction. Without a Design System, features are created from scratch instead of utilizing global components. This results in multiple variations of the same components living outside the core code, making them fragile and frequently inconsistent.

Each new hire and project adds to the variability in the process, development, and design. Unfortunately, this also leads to a greater margin of error and potential bugs.

So let’s see how a Design System can help improve three key areas: user impact, business impact, and team impact.

User Impact

When considering the impact of a Design System, we must always consider its impact on the end-user experience. A Design System contributes to enhancing the experience and delivering better quality and consistency in several ways.

The end user expects a polished and consistent experience when using our product. A Design System can help refine the quality of our product by making the experience more consistent, predictable, and accessible.

Undoubtedly, this is the result of collaboration between design and development teams.

Example: I want to increase the number of subscriptions on my platform.

Key results:

• Increase Design System coverage for the “subscription” product from 12% to 44%. Increase in mobile purchases from 43% to 65%.
• Business Impact Having a dedicated team for creating a design system can be a smart business decision that helps some companies save time; as we know, time is money.

How can a Design System save your company money?

As a product matures, it becomes increasingly complex and requires in-depth system knowledge. Without a system in place, it takes more time and money to deliver products to the market.

What about you?

Do you see other ways to measure the impact of your Design System?

Have you tried any points that worked (OR NOT — that would be incredible learning to share)?

🧳 Take away

• Top 12 Design Systems to Steal from and Up Your Design Game
• Here is a great video on how to measure the ROI of a Design System with some use cases.