Rangle and InVision are proud to announce a strategic partnership, enabling Rangle to advise InVision’s clients on successful approaches to Design Systems and Design Operations. This new offering will cover a wide range of topics, including building and maintaining a design system using InVision Design System Manager, ensuring wide adoption, and methods to improve collaboration between designers and developers.
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Rangle is one of only a few select InVision partners, and we are excited to bring our industry-leading expertise to this partnership. These are the types of problems we are already solving with our clients and we are excited to solve even more as a partner of InVision:
- In partnership with one of the world’s largest fashion retailers, we created a Design System that enables brand consistency across multiple countries, regions, and languages. This Design System empowers the business to test and learn from new products and initiatives quickly, creating exceptional customer experiences.
- A top sporting goods retailer chose to work with Rangle for a digital transformation. Together, we built a Design System to revitalize their online and ecommerce presence to create on-brand, consistent, and user-centric experiences across every touchpoint.
- We now work with a leading American airline to activate compelling experiences with efficiency and consistency. Implementing a Component Library, we ensure faster roll-outs of subsequent applications and also reduce both technical and design debt.
InVision’s market-leading suite helps Rangle deliver design systems faster. It also allows us to operationalize its governance model to ensure smooth adoption and continuous iteration. In our new partnership, we will apply our extensive knowledge to workshops, webinars, and other engagements on behalf of InVision.
More about the partnership
Leading companies use design to drive efficiency and profit, and solidify their position in the market. InVision, for their The New Design Frontier report, surveyed thousands of companies to explore the relationship between design practices and business performance. They found that nearly three-quarters of companies said that they have improved customer satisfaction and usability through design.
Similarly, McKinsey & Company tracked the design practices of 300 publicly-listed companies over five years, with the end goal of quantifying the business value of design.
Both InVision and McKinsey found that design can have a direct impact on tangible business results like revenue, valuation, and time-to-market. McKinsey distilled their findings into the McKinsey Design Index (MDI). It rates companies on how strong they are in design and, more importantly, how that relates to real business value. They found a strong correlation between high MDI scores and superior business performance. Top-quartile MDI scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over five years — 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.
So how did they level up? And how can you avoid being left behind? Ultimately, it’s one thing — creating a user-centric strategy. As designers move away from the production role, they can focus on the user and not the spec. User research allows you to de-risk your products by speaking with your users throughout the design and development process. These findings not only help to drive decision making, they also bring a unique lens to your business strategy.
According to the December 2018 Forrester report, Elevate Your Design Practice To Differentiate Experiences, Experience Design is essential for successful customer experience. However, it is not a reality for most organizations.
InVision found that 41% of organizations only focus on the most visible aspects of design — the UI. They have significant room to grow. As businesses recognize the competitive advantage that powerful customer experience can provide, the need for investing in design is higher than ever. Design must be elevated, prioritized, and scalable to deliver highly differentiated experiences.
Design Systems and Design Operations
An organization cannot organically evolve robust design practices. It requires a meaningful investment in people, platforms and processes. As more emphasis is placed on design across the business, design systems, design operations, and the associated tooling become mission-critical.
A Design System is a systematic approach to product development — complete with guidelines, principles, philosophies, and code. It spotlights how a team designs, making it a fantastic tool for scaling your design practice, reducing the need for hand-off and promoting more collaboration. Our approach to a Design System includes: Design Tokens, Components (both in design tools and code), a developer Sandbox, Documentation and a Governance Model.
Design systems are an essential milestone in the journey of a company employing the most mature design practices. Design systems allow formalized design as a scalable function. It seeds design operations, clearing the way for consumers of the design system (your product designers) to focus solely on solving problems for the customer. It also allows you to treat design as a first-class citizen and assess its performance with the same rigour as you would use when tracking revenue and cost.
A Design System in Practice
The key considerations when developing a design system are: Ensuring organization-wide adoption, accelerating speed to market, and a full line-of-sight for the performance of customer experiences. You learn from there, iterating and making things better as you go.
To do this well, you have to accept the following and the related challenges:
- It’s best to have cross-functional teams. When designers and developers work together, they require a workflow and tools that enable collaboration and accountability between the two teams.
- The design system will grow and evolve. This continuous iteration needs to be managed, just like any other product. A governance model defines how you continue to develop and maintain the design system, as well as how others can contribute to it. It’s not enough to have a governance model defined. You also have to operationalize it to ensure that teams adoption.
- The documentation must be kept up to date with the latest released live code examples. The older versions of the documentation must also be available, as teams may be on different versions of the design system.
- Empower the teams creating the experiences. Often an uncomfortable cultural shift needs to occur to allow for empowerment. Design Operations helps formalize this change. Learn more in Rangle's new Design System Hub.
InVision Design System Manager
We can solve these challenges with technology. Many teams invest in custom tooling, however, it’s often not the right choice. In many cases, it’s also not financially viable.
InVision Design System Manager (DSM) is a platform that allows teams to create, maintain, and evolve a design system. The DSM platform includes Sketch integration, a web view and access control & version management. It handles critical components of any design system and helps formalize and operationalize your maintenance model.
Overview:
- A cloud management system to host your design system — assets, components, and documentation with version control.
- A plugin for Sketch so designers can access and update the design system without breaking their workflow.
- A design token API to support the design-to-developer workflow with programmatic access to your design data.
- A Web View for crafting and publishing the documentation for your design system. Complete with design assets, usage guidelines, and code. It also includes support for Storybook to add coded components to your documentation.
Together, Rangle and InVision are joining forces to accelerate speed to market, and a full line-of-sight for the performance of customer experiences. Connect with us to learn more.
Learn more about design systems in Rangle's new Design System Hub.