Design is in the news a lot these days. The US government recently created an initiative mandating better design for government services. Accessibility regulations around the globe increasingly mandate that businesses and public sector organizations prioritize inclusive design. And organizations failing to practice responsible design are being held accountable – evidenced by the recent FTC settlement with Amazon. We’re often asked by clients, “what’s the most important thing we should invest in to create better digital experiences for customers?”  The answer: a design system.   

Forrester defines a design system as the translation of a company’s brand into a set of foundations, content standards, components, and patterns that teams use to create digital experiences. Organizations getting design right ensure their design systems include all four of these elements and spans both brand and customer experience. 

These four pillars define and provide examples for the core components of a design system. Foundations are the building blocks for components and patterns. Examples include experience principles, colors and palettes, typography, icons, illustrations, photography, motion, spacing, grids, haptics, and brand identity, personality, and logos. Content standards are guidelines and best practices for writing scalable content. Examples include voice and tone, grammar, in-product word list, inclusive writing, writing for errors, alt text guidelines, writing for screen readers, readability, writing with empathy, avoiding jargon, error messages, and tooltips. Components are reusable, tested user interface elements. Examples include accordion, alert, badges, banner, breadcrumbs, buttons, calendar picker, caption, cards, checkbox, combo box, disclosure, drop-down, and footer. Patterns are component combinations that address common user goals. Examples include global header, form, modal, navigation, progress bar, search, log-in, notifications, dialogs, file upload, table, banner, and carousel. These examples are not exhaustive. The specific elements a company should include depends on the company context (e.g., experience types, industry).

What are the benefits of a design system? 

Two-thirds of organizations tell us they use a design system and we project that number will increase significantly in the next year for four reasons:  

  • First, design systems are critical to improving brand and customer experience. When all a company’s digital products are rooted in consistent design choices and content, customers can move through tasks and transition among channels more easily.  In this way, design systems help brands improve the total experience.   
  • Second, design systems create major efficiencies. Design systems accelerate the time from design to development, help organizations get products to market faster, and help teams make decisions faster by clarifying what quality design means for the brand. 
  • Third, design systems reduce risk. Design systems help organizations scale security and accessibility best practices by providing standardized tested building blocks for experiences. They also help maintain brand and consumer trust by helping teams ensure every touchpoint looks and feels like it was created by the same company.  In this sense, design systems are key to maintaining your brand.  
  • Fourth, design systems increase employee engagement. By reducing repetitive and tedious work, design systems free up time for designers to work on new challenges no one has solved yet.  They also improve collaboration across teams by enabling a smoother design-to-development transition.  

Get answers to your top questions about design systems  

If you’re a Forrester client, check out our new report Q&A: Getting Started With Design Systems to get answers to the six most important questions to ask when building a design system. Then set up a conversation with us to learn how to apply these practices within your organization.