From frustration to celebration: how a design system can help your business

A design system is a fantastic tool that has multiple benefits and a great impact on the quality of work for your creative and engineering teams and eventually raises the overall quality of the experience you are offering your users or customers. However, there is no “one size fits all” approach to acquiring a design system; your environment, needs, and resources will have a great impact on the bricks that, once put together, will be your design system.

Let’s begin by going over the benefits of a design system for your teams, the mistakes to avoid when planning and building one, in order to manage expectations from stakeholders and decision-makers.

Benefits of a Design System in 2025

Before diving into the details of design systems, let’s go over the benefits for your teams (whether they are part of your creative, engineering teams) and your end users.

For Creative Teams

Designers and marketers gain structured documentation on design foundations and components, that will help them design experiences that remain “on brand”. A unified naming system improves collaboration as everyone speaks a shared language. Using variables (design tokens) facilitates theming, enabling light and dark mode and even unlocks multi-brand adaptation if you are working with more than one brand.

Without a design system, rebranding efforts require extensive manual updates; with one, such changes are a matter of a few minutes. Once adopted, design systems increase designer productivity by 34%, according to Figma’s research.

For Engineering Teams

Engineers benefit from continuity between design and development thanks to shared design tokens that ensure accuracy, eliminating guesswork or constant back-and-forth to get the right values. In the same way, reusable components accelerate development while maintaining consistency. Issues found by QA can be fixed within the design system, propagating updates across all products, instead of manual updates that can fragment your brand, engineers update a single package. A study on design system ROI found that engineers experience a 31% productivity increase with an effective design system.

For Users & Business Growth

A well-maintained design system improves UX quality, accessibility, and trust in your brand. Users experience consistent interactions, reducing friction and cognitive load. Beyond UX, a public design system can serve as a recruitment tool, showcasing a company's design and engineering maturity to potential new employees.

The Basics of Design Systems

Many companies want a design system but quickly get frustrated when the time comes to actively build it. This could be attributed to different elements: poor awareness of the core concept of a design system, poor planning of resources, or mismanagement of the design system’s governance. Or simply treating a design system as a nice-to-have, worked on “when we have time” by “whoever is available.”

We believe that going back to the basics would be beneficial and help us build this shared understanding of what a design system really covers. Here is a simple definition of a design system by Marco Suarez from the Design System Handbook:

Let’s go over the standards of a design system that Suarez evoked in his definition.

The Standards of a Design System

Design system standards vary in naming but share the same core principles: consistency, transparency, and maintainability.

• Consistency
  helps us build robust user experiences by establishing solid foundations (colors, typography, spacing units, and corner radii) used by all teams. Documenting these foundations provides guidelines on their use, including accessibility considerations like contrast ratios.

• Transparency
  improves confidence by making design decisions clear. Documentation logs every decision, including who made it and why, creating traceability. Having identifiable design system contributors also enhances transparency.

• Maintainability
  is crucial for long-term success. Design systems must adapt to rebrands, product evolution, and software updates. Storing platform-agnostic foundations in standardized formats will facilitate future updates for designers and engineers to work with. Documentation evolves with operating system updates (i.e. new features offered with a new version of Android or iOS), to constantly be on top of innovation and compatibility. Maintenance is an ongoing effort requiring a clear, structured governance and thorough version control.

These elements are measurable through continuous research and data analysis, helping teams refine their design system over time.

What Isn’t a Design System

A design system integrates design, code, and documentation. Some tools mimic aspects of a design system but lack one of these three constituents.

• Style guides
  document brand elements (colors, typography, icons) but lack coded components, version control, and structured updates.

• Component libraries
  provide ready-made components with generic documentation. Contrary to a design system, they aren’t tailored to a specific brand’s needs or design identity.

You're unsure whether you need a design system, style guide, or component library? We can help you define the best strategy that will match your needs.

How to Build a Design System

Design systems are neither easy nor fast to build. They require careful planning, continuous refinement, and dedicated effort at every step of their lifecycle. Here’s how to approach it:

1. Assess Your Needs

In this discovery step, we are trying to find out if a design system is the right solution for us. During this phase, you will need to assess your needs by talking to your engineers, designers, and stakeholders to identify challenges—whether it’s inconsistent UI patterns, inefficient handoffs, or unclear documentation. A style guide or component library might be more suited in some cases (small, single-device projects for instance)

Evaluating your creative and technical stack is also important. Understanding the tools you have, coding languages you use, and integration needs of your developers will help you build a proof-of-concept that is more fitting your existing environment.

This step represents the baseline of the design system lifecycle and feeds valuable information to the rest of the cycle.

2. Setting Up a Proof of Concept

Once frustrations are identified, determine how your design system will be structured. Will it have a centralized team, or will contributions be distributed across multiple teams? In addition to the structure, it’s important to assess the workload distribution — an ideal approach would be to have a few people working 100% of their time on the system (until you get the structure right with the foundations and a few components).

Budgeting can be tricky. Starting with a small proof of concept helps estimating how much resources you need to work on the system, you can always reassess the allocation as you receive feedback from the people working on it.

3. Start Small

Popular design systems such as IBM Carbon, Ant Design, Material Design took years to mature. Your system is just beginning. Start with foundations (colors, fonts, and icons), focusing on accuracy, documentation, and compliance with accessibility guidelines. Once foundations are defined and stable, introduce a simple first component and expand gradually. This phase is ideal for integrating research and feedback loops. Gather insights through feedback, usability tests, and analytics. Tools like Figma provide data on component usage, helping refine your components and track adoption.

Final Thoughts

The decision to start a design system is not light, as we explained in this article, it requires proper planning and effort to get going. The timeline of such a project can be daunting for some businesses as they need quick solutions to their immediate issues. Once a plan is defined, with proper resource allocation, your creative and engineering teams will collaborate better, working for the same goal of creating consistent and innovative experiences for your end users.

We can accompany you at every step of the way to build more consistent and usable products.