A source of truth not just for designers but for development teams, QA as well

A calendar interface for April 2023 with navigation arrows, day labels, and control buttons labeled 'Reset', 'Cancel', and 'Ok'.
Comparison of two dropdown menu design options for a form, with the left labeled 'Do' and the right labeled 'Don't'.

The challenge

As a "single source of truth," a design system needs to integrate all the knowledge required by product development teams, from the basic graphical details to the permutations in behaviour.

With three separate design and development teams overseeing the product's modules, it is essential to establish a process that links its implementation and distribution.

Top considerations

Flowchart titled 'Do you really need a new component?' with questions about design goals and interactions, leading to a character from Toy Story with the caption 'To the DS and beyond!' and additional guidance for defining new interactions.

  • By understanding the needs of each product within the ecosystem, it greatly reduces rework on each component. This also helps to ensure the component is designed in consideration of the different potential scenarios

  • It’s very tempting and easy to simply take existing style guides from the likes of Google Material/Atlassian and calling it a day. But it becomes troubling when scenarios are not understood well and it becomes over-engineered, impacting the work for tech teams. (eg Google’s button modes)

  • Understand each other’s product and collectively agreeing what is good enough to ship for X iteration is a communication must-have. We discovered this helps teams to focus better.

  • Admittedly, sometimes we designers get overly excited and try to introduce as many ways of interaction as possible. To keep the system from going out of control, we ended up following this train of thought as shown.

  • Keeping design system check ins from typical feature reviews help to keep the team grounded in communication and evolve the system where and when needed.