November 1, 2024

Why you’re NOT seeing Holistic Impact from your Design System

Most design system teams I interact with feel like they are still not getting all the impact they had hoped for from their systems. There are two primary reasons this happens.

1. An over-reliance on design system assets (things like tokens and components, etc.) to make impact across an entire suite of digital interfaces.
2. A lack of understanding around the culture change needed that allows a design system to authentically take root.

I’ve been noodling with some diagrams to help communicate why this happens based on my work with our clients at Sparkbox and the research I’ve conducted on design system culture. The following illustration captures it fairly well.

Four quadrants of holistic design system impact. On the x-axis, spanning from common interaction patterns on the left to product-specific interaction patterns on the right. On the y-axis, spanning from tactical approaches (like tokens and components) on the bottom to strategic approaches (impact through culture change) on the top.

Unpacking the Quadrants

The x-axis on this diagram represents every digital interface your organization creates. On the far left are the ones that are common to all of them (things like your brand colors or very low-level components). On the far right are the ones that are hyper-specific to one product (maybe a color swatch selector only used in some far-reaching corner of an e-commerce website somewhere).

The y-axis spans from “tactical” on the bottom to “strategic” on the top.

By tactical, I mean the stuff product or feature teams can directly take and use in their work. There’s a lot of stuff that fits into this category. In fact, most of what you read about around design systems is how to design, build, and distribute this stuff. It’s the CSS custom properties that can be imported into a web product. It’s the React button component and it’s the layout system you offer teams so that they can position things properly on screen.

By strategic, I DON’T mean just a list of design principles. Those are important, but I think they live somewhere in the middle of the y-axis. I’m thinking of the ways you encourage and reward the behaviors of individuals or teams that live out those principles.

Culture is driven by what individuals believe and it’s made visible by the decisions they make when things are hard.

The things at the top of this axis are the ways you slowly help create alignment in what individuals believe. Those are things like your incentive structure and decision making frameworks that help individuals find solutions that align with the goals of the design system. This also includes activities like involving individual contributors in the clear articulation of “the way we make digital interfaces.”

I’ve labeled the top left quadrant “Inefficient cohesion.” That’s because this is a space where there is alignment of values—a strong culture—but there aren’t tactical assets for teams to use. So, while the output of organizations can be great here, there’s just a lot of inefficiency because they are all solving the common problems for themselves.

If you find yourself operating here, a great next step is to begin to build out some assets that cover the most common interface patterns across your products.

I’ve labeled the bottom right quadrant “Add more components.” That’s because in order to reach into those product-specific interaction patterns without value alignment, you just have make everything an asset. In an extreme version of this world, the design system would have every component needed by every product—not feasible. (This is often what leadership expects of a design system unless you’re very intentional to correct that assumption.)

If you find yourself operating here, it’s time to begin cutting back on what your design system offers. With the time you save by not having to maintain so many assets, start working on incentives and decision making frameworks that support the principles of the design system.

I’ve labeled the bottom left quadrant “Efficient cohesion.” Here, the design system team has identified the common patterns and solved for those with assets that can be reused across the organization. This is the baseline for creating some impact and many system programs never grow beyond this. That’s not necessarily a problem. However, without the cultural guidance provided by the top of the y-axis and without assets to solve product-specific challenges, product teams will feel like they are constrained by the design system instead of enabled by it.

If you find yourself primarily operating here, that’s fantastic! It’s time to start working into the top right quadrant as well.

I’ve labeled the top right quadrant “Future proof and far reaching.” This is where the most impactful systems work happens—the cultural alignment stuff. The tasks here result in individuals throughout the organization feeling confident that they are making decisions that align. It’s empowering and freeing.

If you are successfully operating here, you are in the minority. Start publishing articles on your approach! Also, reach out and come on The Question as a co host sometime soon. :)

Invention vs Reuse

This thinking reminds me of a challenging conversation that always comes up in my work with design system teams—when do we invent and when do we reuse? I’ve drawn many diagrams illustrating the decision tree, I’ve helped teams think through the scenarios where invention should be encouraged, and I’ve interviewed numerous individual contributors and executives about this. The problem I see is that most individuals can answer this pretty easily, and they all think everyone else would agree with them. However, there’s a very wide spectrum of beliefs about where this line should be drawn. That line moves depending on the culture of the organization and the priorities of the person I’m talking to.

Connecting this back to assets vs culture, I believe a design system’s assets have to enable great digital experiences (with cohesive defaults) and the culture of an organization has to appropriately constrain those digital experiences.

One reason I like this distinction: I want the consumers of a design system to be able to work with the system assets to experiment (ie., break the molds of what has been done). Those experiments could result in

1. new terrible experiences
2. no noticeable difference in the experience
3. great innovation in the experience

If the system isn’t flexible enough to allow this kind of experimentation, we likely prevent terrible results, but we also likely prevent great innovation.

So, how do we strike the balance here. How do we create a design system program that results in reuse in the right places and innovation when it’s needed? I’m suggesting we let the system be flexible enough to enable all kinds of things (but build it to default to a standard), then we shift the burden of constraint to the culture.

Doing this allows organizations that have more “creative” cultures to get the benefit of cohesion while still pushing their work in ways that align with that creativity (disruption, etc.).

It also allows organizations that have more “control” cultures (hierarchy and risk-aversion) to rely on their culture to steer product teams toward more cohesive output unless there’s a real need to innovate, at which time the system doesn’t prevent this.

Note: the distinction between “creative” and “control” cultures is a reference to “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture Based on The Competing Values Framework” (Cameron, Quinn) which I’ve written about in the context of design systems here.

The Ideal

In a perfect world, a design system team would operate primarily in the bottom left and top right of the “holistic impact” diagram above. That gives them the strong tactical approach to solving common interaction problems and the cultural alignment needed to do cohesive and efficient work on the most unique interfaces throughout the organization.

This understanding is what has led my team and I at Sparkbox to approach all of our design system work from both a tactical and strategic approach. This is the only sustainable way I’ve found to help organizations get the kind of holistic impact they hope for when beginning a design system. It’s never easy work, but it’s always rewarding.

If you’re struggling to get the most impact from your design system, I can run a workshop with you and your team to show you how I assess an organization’s culture and translate that into an approach for a design system that will take root.

Let’s connect and make it happen.

Writing Design Systems