December 24, 2019

Day 18: Design system ' components deprecation

Your design system is available from a year now and now you have to take the call on removing some components or features. Should you? and if yes...then how?

Why yo remove or deprecate the components?

Design system is an evolving product. You need to upgrade as the industry is moving ahead with time or your own organization is adopting new styles. It is important that while you are adding more components and features in your DS to remove some old features ad components. This is important because your DS is getting heavier and you want to make space for new features and components. You don't want to keep anything which is no longer necessary for your organization and also you don't want to confuse your DS users by providing some old components and features.

How to identify the components to be deprecated?

To be honest, this could be challenging. As there are products or people already using your DS but it is an important activity.

  1. Analytics to check which is the least used component.
  2. Talk to designers which component to drop from the overall organization UI guidelines and patterns.
  3. Talk to products which component is not used by them and accordingly take the decisions.

Important to note here, you need to inform everyone who is your DS users that which all components and features support you are planning to drop from next or any planned date. Also, have a fall-back plan too for them. If someone is using after dropping till how long you have the plan to support them or help them to upgrade on some new component.

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