{"id":13885,"date":"2018-01-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/post\/design-systems-shared-consistent-user-experience-matters_cxd\/"},"modified":"2021-12-15T00:14:40","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T05:14:40","slug":"design-systems-shared-consistent-user-experience-matters_cxd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/blog\/design-systems-shared-consistent-user-experience-matters_cxd\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Systems: Why a Shared, Consistent User Experience Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
Companies are increasingly focusing on design and user experience resources on improving not just their customer-facing digital products, but also their internal-facing systems.<\/p>\n
In this enterprise space, employees expect and deserve internally consumed products that have the same design and UX quality that external customers have come to expect.<\/p>\n
To be frank, having a stunning user experience matters to anyone using your systems, no matter what their role. Systems that lack a good user experience cost your company a lot of time \u2013 seen as productivity – and money.<\/p>\n
What do you do when you have dozens of apps within your enterprise that all are developed by different teams and look exceedingly different from application to application? They may all have your company\u2019s logo and brand colors, but their interfaces and experiences are divergent from each other.<\/p>\n
You can tell yourself that each of the systems has a different user base. System X is for the Finance group, System Y is for Sales, and System Z is for Operations. So, you convince yourself you don\u2019t need a consistent experience for them since different people use each of the systems.<\/p>\n
You can keep telling yourself that, but from 20-plus years of experience in user research within enterprise client organizations, I can tell you that it is not the case. As companies try to improve collaboration and have their employees take on increasingly diverse workloads, people will use a variety of systems throughout the enterprise that is not specific to their job functions.<\/p>\n
The need exists to create a shared and consistent experience for this plethora of applications used by your employees. It\u2019s important that the experience is easily learnable and doesn\u2019t take up a significant portion of the development time while these applications are being built.<\/p>\n
This is all happening while companies are trying to decrease development costs and time to market of internal systems.\u00a0 With that in mind, there are a couple of options:<\/p>\n
Hiring more people can help with issues around time to market, but throwing more people at the problem, rarely works. Moreover, designing faster usually means cutting corners, which leads to less than ideal design solutions – including one-off solutions that become increasingly difficult to maintain over time.<\/p>\n
So, the only real choice is to create solutions that solve problems for multiple applications.<\/p>\n
Enter: Design Systems.<\/p>\n
Design Systems are a collection of reusable components, driven by a set of clear and concise principles and guidelines that can be combined to construct any number of applications.<\/p>\n
Unlike a style guide, which traditionally has brand elements, such as logo usage, typography, colors and the like, design systems usually have all the elements of a style guide, but also a comprehensive set of UI components, both as design elements and typically as front-end code.<\/p>\n
Think Legos\u00ae for your design and development process.<\/p>\n