Design Systems: The Latest Trend in UI Innovation

Design Systems: The Latest Trend in UI Innovation
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Why are so many product design teams releasing design systems these days? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by David Cole, Director of Design at Quora:

There are probably many reasons, but I think one major factor is that design systems are one of the few remaining areas where mobile/web user interface design can play the central role in innovation. To see why this is, it's helpful to understand the S-curve theory of innovation cycles:

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Here's the basic idea:

  • In the early days of a new technology, progress is slow, practical applications are rare, usage is limited to early adopters
  • As the technology takes off, progress picks up in speed, applications are powerful and widespread, usage includes more and more average people
  • As maturation sets in, progress slows back down, novel applications become harder to find, usage saturates the market
  • Finally, a new innovation emerges and climbs its own curve from a higher starting position, eventually obviating the older technology

If you apply this to web and mobile applications, it's pretty clear that we're in the maturation phase: the technology is ubiquitous, and innovation — at the interface level — is rare. I've seen a fair number of designers lament the fact that most products share the same UI patterns, but common patterns are more likely to be accessible to a wide, non-technical audience — a pretty reasonable consideration to prioritize.

Even in the rare cases where there is interface innovation, it is quickly copied and rendered a commodity. The most obvious example of this would be the Snapchat Stories UI paradigm, which can now be found in any number of apps (admittedly, to varying degrees of success).

If the majority of products and features can be assembled out of a fixed kit of stock UI parts, what is a designer bringing to the table? Yes, there's the know-how to pick the right pattern for the job at hand, but that ability becomes increasingly trivial as the S-curve flattens out and best practices converge.

So as basic UI design becomes a commodity, UI designers have moved upstream in pursuit of greater leverage. Building a comprehensive, consistent, cross-platform, polished, robustly built, well-documented, principled design system is certainly broader in scope than designing one-off flows.

You can see the effects of this S-curve dynamic playing out in other ways as well. Another way to move upstream in a commodified market is to build tools, and there's been an explosion of prototyping and design workflow tools.

A more dramatic response is to hop over to the bottom of the next big S-curve. And indeed, you see many UI designers excited to move into more speculative areas that have the potential to become ubiquitous, such as VR/AR, voice, or ML/AI.

On our design team here at Quora, we see our product as platform agnostic and aim to bring the experience to wherever it will be helpful. Accordingly, we focus heavily on the deeper and more conceptual facets of the user experience that we term the mechanics, which cut across all platforms and interfaces. As a discipline, mechanics design will exist in some form across all future innovation cycles, making it a particularly high form of leverage.

. . .

Answer by Adam Michela, Digital Product Investor, Designer, and Engineer:

Why ‘Design Systems’? Why now?

Here are two significant factors:

  • Interface production has been industrialized.
  • Design Systems sound really cool.

I led the creation of Airbnb’s widely recognized and influential Design Language System (DLS). The project was based largely on my prior experience spearheading the creation of Facebook’s Interface Guidelines (FIG) — a much earlier effort, largely unknown (outside of Facebook), with fundamentally identical goals and output, under a much less enticing banner.

Airbnb’s DLS began with a list of about a dozen principles. Here were the first two:

  1. It is a design and development tool.
  2. It is inspiring, desirable, and marketable.

That reads like the first list above, doesn’t it?

The Industrialization of Interface Production

Airbnb, Facebook, and most leading technology companies today are nearly identical in their organizational structure. Individuals practiced in disciplines like software design, software development (leading technology companies market this as engineering), and project management (marketed as product management) are broken out into small “product” teams.

This organizational structure brings many benefits. It also presents many challenges: when you’ve distributed designers and developers into small groups within an organization of hundreds or thousands, all while having them contribute to software with a very small surface area (and the customer expectation of a singular experience), how do you maintain consistency and reliability? How do you avoid unnecessary change or regression? How do you maintain quality? Most meaningfully to the business, how do you maintain velocity? It’s incredibly expensive to have hundreds of well paid designers and developers re-inventing an interface and programming it from scratch with every product iteration.

The standardized organizational structure you now find across the technology industry was a first step towards industrialization. Design systems are a step towards standardized machining and manufacturing of interfaces in a world where these tools are not unified by a single operating system.

The primary reason Airbnb’s DLS is called a “system” is because it is much more than a set of standard interface design patterns. It’s a set of standard patterns that are manifest in common production processes, a robust programming framework, and that are designed to be encapsulated in a new generation of high-level design, prototyping, and development tools. It’s also a marketing effort:

The Incredible Influence of Brand and Marketing

Another side-effect of the contemporary organizational design within the technology industry is an extreme internal bias against process, standardization and efficiency. Why? There are two noteworthy dynamics at play:

  1. Designers (and programmers) dream of being artists. For example, while we were creating DLS inside of Airbnb, I welcomed a new designer to the company and gave her a tour of what we were building. Her immediate reaction was: “That’s very cool, but won’t it limit my creativity?” My honest answer: “Well, in some ways, yes, that’s kind of the point.” The day-to-day job of a designer on a product team is to determine how a product should work, not how it should look. The design of a product’s look and feel is easily centralized, and—from a customer’s perspective—should seldom change. If you’ve entered into technology from art school with a focus on graphic design, this can be an uncomfortable mismatch of expectations.
  2. The current composition of these organizations—the ratio of programmers to designers—is uncomfortably tenuous. An idyllic, efficient future doesn’t require hundreds or thousands of developers to maintain and iterate on a few applications. The programming of software is destined to be commoditized. Designing an organization in this way made sense ten years ago, it won’t make sense ten years from now. This reality has individuals at all levels in today’s technology organizations—those well-paid butts filling seats, and those measured by the ‘headcount’ they manage—extremely anxious.

You can imagine how these dynamics present a challenge to the success of a project like DLS.

By the time I was given the responsibility of designing the strategy for creating and instituting DLS at Airbnb I was well aware of these dynamics. FIG—Facebook’s Interface Guidelines—left me painfully familiar with the internal politics we would face, but it also cemented my understanding of the leverage external brand and marketing can create internally. Inside of Facebook I repeatedly saw the following story play out: (1) Developer creates a new project, (2) developer sees limited internal enthusiasm, (3) developer publishes the project under Facebook’s open-source banner, (4) project captures the industry’s attention, (5) legions of new developers join Facebook enthusiastic to work with these new tools, (6) Facebook quickly adopts the project internally.

This is the secondary reason Airbnb’s project was coined a Design System (despite ample internal pressure to brand it differently). I knew that the brand would be relevant in today’s zeitgeist, and knew that the external momentum we could create around the brand would ultimately drive internal adoption. This is the positive feedback loop that I knew would reinforce the project’s success, and accelerate the adoption of these practices across the industry.

Design Systems are cool, and they sound even cooler.

(An unanticipated side effect is that across the industry many are now describing “interface guidelines” as “design systems”. I’m betting that software’s unrelenting march into industrialization resolves this.)

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