How a Product Design System Can Save You Time and Money
How a Product Design System Can Save You Time and Money
If you’ve ever built a mobile product, you know time equals money.
And without a clear plan in place, it’s easy for your project and your udget to spiral out of control.
One day, you kick off a product build full of hope and life. You have a well-thought out, finely tuned idea the market is clamouring for. This app could be a game changer.
Then the scope creep starts. Ideas for the user interface (UI) are coming from everywhere, and many of them are good. Things are getting exciting, but your design and development teams are being pulled in way too many directions.
Next thing you know, months have gone by. You’re nearly out of budget, your deadline is only a few weeks away, and you’re barely any closer to completing a minimum viable product.
That’s why it’s crucial to install a Product Design system before you begin development.
What is a Product Design System?
A Product Design System is kind of like a brand kit for your developers:
How a Product Design System saves your development hours
As any product manager can tell you, writing code is only half the battle during a successful launch.
A typical snapshot of a mobile product release in progress might look something like this:
● One scrum team is working on the app’s checkout flow.
● Simultaneously, a designer is working on tweaks to the home screen.
● Once both of those are ready, the backend team will have to quickly connect your database to the app through an API.
Now imagine you don’t have a Product Design System in place. How will your various teams coordinate the look, feel, and functionality of all these components?
The answer is, they probably won’t.
Assumptions will likely be made, and somewhere down the line, your teams will realize these components don’t quite fit together. Developers will then have to spend valuable hours redoing already completed work.
There are few things more frustrating or expensive than having to backtrack during a product release. But perhaps more importantly, redundant efforts like this can lead to a less user friendly — and ultimately less successful final product.
How to create a Product Design System
It might be more work up front — but creating an effective Product Design System at the start of a project will save you development hours (and money) in the end.
So how does one go about creating a Product Design System?
- Get your designers and developers in the same room (whether physical or virtual) and have them talk through the various components of the product.
- Write down as many use cases of the product as possible and think about the various interactions that will be needed for each.
- Work with your designers to create components that can be easily replicated across the different areas of the product. These can be visual elements like icons, fonts, and colors, as well as libraries of code for various parts of the application.
- Keep it simple. Use whatever format works for your team, and don’t feel like you need to spend hours and hours on some fancy dashboard or portal. In many cases, a simple Google Doc or PDF can suffice just fine. A functional but rough UI design repository is much better than a non-existent one!
Now imagine the following scenario:
You’re halfway through the build of an enterprise cybersecurity app. Everything is going well, but then you attend a networking conference. Meeting with several CTOs in the span of a few days, you think of a new, potentially groundbreaking use-case you’ve never considered before.
But that would mean reworking the entire app, right?
Thankfully, you planned ahead, and your team has had a comprehensive Product Design System in place since the beginning of the project.
You call your lead developer and tell her about the new functionality you’re looking for. She considers the request while you hold your breath.
“No problem,” she says. “It’ll take a bit of work, but we have plenty of components in the design system to pull from.”
The team successfully integrates the new technology you had in mind, making your app infinitely more useful to a wide-variety of CTOs.
Plan ahead for maximum flexibility
Creating a Product Design System doesn’t mean that your product won’t go through any changes during the development process. Quite the opposite in fact. Creating a coherent UI system gives your team a sturdy foundation to build on, meaning the product can be molded and adapted as you go.
It may seem contradictory, but overplanning during the beginning of a project actually provides you with maximum flexibility in the end.
If you have any questions about creating a Product Design System, or if this sounds like something your team could use help with, feel free to give us a shout at hello@ideaqu.com.