Cast your villain
After that VERY long email yesterday (sorry!), you’re either ready to start building something you can pitch to your team… or your feeling overwhelmed.
Before you get overwhelmed by all this — and certainly before you build a new design system or try to get leadership support for one — what problem are you trying to solve? Ed Chao, a designer who helped launch Dropbox’s design system, calls this “casting your villain.”
I hinted at a few villains earlier when I talked about building multiple products, but let’s get a few of the most notorious baddies in a line-up:
👿 Inefficiency. Do your teams build the same thing over and over again? This may get you up and running quickly, but it increases the time to launch and makes long-term maintenance challenging and increasingly complex.
👿 Insecurity. Are your teams unsure of whether or not they’re making the right decision? This can slow your teams down by making them feel like they have no agency and always need to ask for clarification or approval.
👿 Inconsistency. Do your teams build similar things in different ways? This might make them faster because they don’t have to worry about any other teams or platforms when making decisions, but this has a dark side. The chances of things working correctly goes down, the cost of testing goes up, and your users end up with a chaotic experience and splintered perception of your brand.
So... who is your key villain? Focus on just one, if you can. A well-defined villain helps you better understand the hero you need, a.k.a. how you decide the parts of a design system you need to build.
If your villain is inefficiency, you might start by moving your most commonly used components into a library and keep them light on prescribed styling. If your villain is inconsistency, you might start with a code library of brand color values that can be easily integrated into products until you’re ready to roll out a full component library. If your villain is insecurity, you may want to start with a well-made reference site that also educates.
What do you value the most? Starting by thinking about value helps you build the right tool for the job.
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Cheers,
Up Next: Beware premature optimization
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