December 24, 2019

Day 16: Research and design system

How to build the design system? What to keep in the design system? What features we should have? How the components should look like? and so on. I am sure whenever you hear about building or designing a design system, these questions popping in your head. Well, whom to go for the answers of these?

One cannot do anything without research. The same goes for the Design system. It is important to research before building or designing the design system. Why? to get the answers to all the questions and to understand what all other DSs are doing in the market and how?

It is not important to follow blindly what others are doing in their DSs but important is to understand 'what and how' they are doing. Try to fit that in your requirements, bend the rules if necessary and build your design system. One of the benefits of doing this research that now, you have the list of what 'others' are doing as compared to what you are doing. Now, when you are going to pitch your DS to someone and if they will do the comparison you already have the pros and cons list with you. You have done your all homework well before.

There would be some situations which you haven't thought of but while doing research you came across such use-case and now this going to help you to implement that in your DS. Basically, for DS it is very important to the research in advance as you will learn that every DS has something unique to offer and you might get benefit out of that.

How to do research?

Search for the DS list and now pick the top DS and look into their features, code, UX, documentation. Use that DS and see how the experience is. Now, break the DS from inside out too to learn the base level implementations.

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