The off-the-shelf trap
Using an off-the-shelf design system such as Google Material or Shopify’s Polaris to speed up your journey is very tempting. Components are already designed, built, and ready to use. However, in today’s world, brand recognition and user experience are paramount to a successful digital presence. Having a site that looks and feels like every other site will inevitably impact your brand loyalty and user conversion.
You can always attempt to customize these off-the-shelf options, but you will quickly realize that the amount of effort required will outweigh the benefits of adopting them in the first place.
For most mid-to-large enterprises, building a custom (bespoke) design system is the way to go. It gives you great flexibility in building a design system that accurately reflects your brand and delights your customers.
Bespoke, faster!
The main impediment in building a bespoke design system is the upfront cost, as you need:
- An understanding of the steps to create a design system, foreseeing interdependencies, constraints, and how a decision now will impact you down the road
- Time to research best practices on how to set up your design system foundation, how to name and structure your tokens, or which components to prioritize
- Insight to adopt practices that fit your context and discard others that aren’t relevant.
- Expertise to make design decisions such as variations, how to tackle designs, and accessibility
- Skillset to set up ways of working and governance that promote communication and alignment between product, design, and technology teams for your organization
- Team knowledge to execute this strategy
- Focus to ensure that all the steps occur in a timely manner
But, you don’t have to do this by yourself.
Introducing Radius
Rangle created Radius, the design system accelerator. Unlike off-the-shelf options that provide ready-to-use but rigid components, Radius provides tools that address the challenges of building your bespoke design system. Thus, it allows you to gain flexibility and customization of having your own design system that fits your brand and delights your customers while reducing the cost and risk associated with building a design system from scratch.
Think of Radius as a framework on how to build a design system that’s tailored to your organization and your needs. Radius is further boosted with tools, demos and workshops to quickly get up to speed, set up your design system and make the right decisions that will help you scale and adopt fast and safeguard your investment against costly rework.
How Radius accelerates your design system by up to 30%
Rangle’s approach is to meet organizations where they are, to help them meet their goals, and to provide them with the language and expertise to continue growing beyond the engagement.
To help you deliver quickly on your design system we dive right away into the work after kick-off, getting to understand:
- Your organization and how you operate
- Stakeholder needs and goals
- What worked for you in the past and what hasn’t
- Current state of your design system
As this is happening, we quickly put together a roadmap pointing out the critical path, and we host a series of workshops providing you with proven practices that are relevant to your organization. We show you demos and examples of what the end state for your design system could look like and help you understand the impact of each decision you are making. We also walk you through our thought process, our reasoning behind our recommendations, and work with you to make decisions that will serve you well now and in the future. Our partnership model ensures that you understand the what and why of each decision being made so that you and your team are set up to continue scaling your design system once the engagement ends.
This helps rally your stakeholders and quickly achieve alignment between product, design and technology, ensuring that you spend less time researching and debating, and more time building and delivering. We also share with you the know-how to help you avoid pitfalls and throwaway work, ensuring that you are on the optimum path to success.
Adoption is king
A design system truly delivers value when it’s adopted.
Measuring adoption, understanding barriers and finding ways to address them is thus critical for design systems.
At Rangle, we implemented Radius Tracker, an automated way to measure adoption in real time. By crawling through the code, Radius Tracker can detect components built using the design system and custom components built by product teams. It can then help the user understand the type of component built by product teams, which product teams are building these custom components and how frequently they are used.
By having this knowledge, the design system team can then quickly analyze this data to surface patterns, and find ways to improve adoption. The design system team can easily report these findings to leadership, and track adoption over time across the organization.
Proven results
At Rangle, we have seen firsthand organizations that took weeks to make one decision about a design system, we have seen the impact of wrong decisions being made, and the rework it generates. We have seen enterprises go with off-the-shelf design systems and be stuck with costly customizations, and companies being stuck with design systems that never got adopted.
That’s why we build Radius, our design system accelerator, and through Radius, we can cover all aspects of a design system setup, from the best tools to use in your context, to the governance model that works for your organization structure. We cover foundation to adoption, metrics to communication plans and support models.
Learn more about Radius here, or consult our in-depth content for developers and designers here.
