https://medium.com/better-product/on-the-current-state-of-design-systems-in-ux-4cd0aa1fad71
I’ve been involved in no fewer than three different initiatives to create a design system in my career. 10 years ago we simply called them pattern libraries. A few years ago, Atomic Design entered the scene and provided a more comprehensive grammar around design systems. Once Google unveiled Material Design in 2014, the concept of design systems had finally matured.
Now, the design system concept seems to spawn an article every day. The theme of these articles typically espouse values of systems as providing consistency, efficiency and scale. But at what costs? Are design systems a panacea for all that ails UX design?
In this article, I’ll provide some nuance to the design system trend. I’ll start with a brief history and rationale behind design systems in UX and end with key considerations and recommendations as you consider using them in your own work.
These have existed in other fields for decades. A wonderful example is A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.
Don’t let this tiny image fool you, this book has lots of pages.
This beautiful book establishes guiding principles for building and urban planning. Despite being written in 1977, it continues to influence landscape designers and architects today.
In interaction design, the first iterations of this appeared in the early 2000’s with several sites (many now defunct) which sought to catalog all the patterns that existed out in the wild. The site http://ui-patterns.com/ is a relic of this past as it seems to offer no real curation. Instead it focuses on establishing what patterns exist and collecting many examples of each.
In 2005, Jennifer Tidwell wrote Designing Interfaces — one of the best books on the subject. The examples are obviously dated, but she coupled UI patterns with HCI well.
I guarantee this duck never designed an interface in its life
These early attempts at design systems in the realm of UX were largely driven by a need to make sense of the expanding world of UI by collecting exemplars. In a world without Dribbble, mobile OS’s, a predominance of native desktop applications, and fairly limited web technology, the early design systems seemed largely driven by collection and sense-making.
Early UX design systems provided a survey map for an emerging UX field carving out space in a new frontier.
This all started to change with the onslaught of new UI technologies in the late aughts and early 2010’s. Flash and desktop-based software gave way to mobile apps and cross-platform UI.
In parallel, we saw how abandoning the comfort zone of Windows chrome left a lot of UX designers (like myself) panicking because we needed to understand how to build a framework in addition to actual screen flows. Brad Frost’s Atomic Design framework was the first large-scale attempt to break out of exemplars and establish a framework UX designers could use to build upon.