Day3: How to start with Design system? #25DaysofDS

You know now what is the design system and when you need it. Now, the question comes is how to start with it. As this is not one person's job. The design system requires inputs from the designer, developer, product people, testers and we also need a design system manager.

Here how one can start the design system

• Design Audit

  The first and foremost exercise to do is the Design audits of the projects and products one has in the organization. This design audit will help the designers in designing the scope of the Design System. As well as, this will be the data for all the design-related decisions. Designers can do the design audit by speaking to the designers from cross teams, talking to marketing teams about the organization's brand guidelines or doing surveys.
  
  • List of components
  • Design Tokens
  • Color Patellate
  • Typography
  • Type scale
  • Space scale
  • Breakpoints, Heights, etc.

• Design specs

  Designers need to prepare the designs for all the components. It could be SketchApp, XD, Photoshop any prefer format but make sure that the developers are able to access them and so is the rest of the team. As well as, think of them as the end-users deliverables, basically this can be accessed by the user of the Design System. In addition to this, these should be scalable, which means that in the future whenever any update is coming designers instead of creating a new file update the same file.

• Tech audit

  Parallelly developers need to do the tech audit to understand which tech stack to use to develop the components and more:
  
  • List of components
  • Tech for the components building
  • Code guidelines
  • Code Control tool
  • CI/CD
  • Responsive breakpoints
  • Browser and OS support
  • Accessibility level - AA or AAA

• Bring all on the same page

  You cannot build a desgin system in isolation. Communication and collabration is the key for the successful design system. Once Design and tech audit is done bring the team and stakeholder on the same page. Discuss the components list, the scope of the designs, tech decisions etc.

• Project Planning

  Once the components list is finalized, the PM can start working on the project sprint and stroy planning. It is better to do have agile development.

• Make it the part of the process

  Design system needs to be the part of the process otherwise it is on no use. figure out the ways you can make it the part of the process.