Day 20: Adding new components in the design system

Your design system is ready. Now, you want to add new components to your design system but how to add it? should you add every request? should you filter out the requests? If yes, then how? How to make sure the new components are added and you can communicate...phew...trust me there are more than these when it comes to adding new components

Add or not to add?

The truth is you need to or you have to add the new components. The design system is an evolving product. Hence, you need to add and remove components. So, first thing say yes to the idea of adding components but yes no to adding all the components request coming to you.

How to filter the new component requests?

This is going to be the toughest decision. Based on my experience I have seen once the product or projects get to know about the design system they will push a lot of components (modules) to the design system team to put their work on the design system team.

The first thing you need to do is to review the component request. Understand is this is something other products can also use? Is there any demand from more than 2-3 projects? can you make it generic for folks to use? do you need to create a new component altogether or you can just create a variation of an existing component? If this answer comes to yes then only go ahead otherwise feel free to say no.

How to add new component and how to communicate?

You need a plan of the releases of your design system. The plan should include what are the changes you are planning to do in the design system. For example, bugs fixing, some components will be removed, some new components going to be added. This plan should be available on your design system documentation. This will help the users to plan their projects accordingly. Always remember to add new components in the releases rather than just adding randomly and pushing the code.