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Building design systems : unify user experiences through a shared design language
Vesselov S., Davis T., Apress, New York, NY, 2019. 164 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484245-13-2)
Date Reviewed: Feb 3 2020

One rarely comes across books dedicated to a niche topic like design systems. User experience is of the utmost importance in this digital era, so a book on building design systems is a precious resource for both new and experienced user experience designers and user interface developers. The authors have taken special care to weave important concepts with their practical wisdom in working with organizations such as GitLab.

The book has eight main chapters. The first two chapters focus on the introduction and history of design systems. Chapter 1 discusses the rise of component-based architectures along with the agile movement. The second chapter discusses six areas that constitute a design system. While design systems are important, they are an investment (costs money) from an organization’s perspective. Hence, an approach is provided to start building a design system, maintaining it, and ensuring it does not fail.

Chapter 3 focuses on building a business case for a design system and provides ideas for selling it to the stakeholders: the senior management that funds, the users who use, and the employees who build or maintain, such as designers, engineers, product managers, and marketing and sales teams. Specific guidance along with a selling worksheet are provided to strengthen the business case in terms of benefits, for example, return on investment (ROI), agility, and so on. Stressing the importance of shared communication between designers and other stakeholders, chapter 4 discusses the lexicon and grammar of a design system. The authors encourage the creation of custom design principles that best serve the organization or the product.

One core chapter (5) dives deep into the creation and implementation of a design system for various types of organizations. To cover different scenarios, it includes three case studies. With the implementation complete, chapter 6 focuses on measuring effectiveness and maintaining the design system. Establishing objective and key results (OKR), along with examples, is a helpful way to track and measure goals. The chapter discusses another technique to gather data through surveys, along with practical templates.

GitLab’s case study that shares the collective experiences of authors working with a design system is the core theme of chapter 7. The authors discuss in detail roles, challenges, tooling, structure, and setup, along with their approach, outcomes, and lessons learned. The final chapter (8) provides a good overview of popular design systems, including open-source options and those from corporate players such as Google, IBM, and a few others.

The authors have leveraged their rich experience and knowledge--for example, building design systems for a range of companies, from startups to large corporations--to write this book. It will serve as a great reference for anybody interested in building or maintaining a design system.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  Ponmurugarajan Thiyagarajan Review #: CR146870 (2006-0123)
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