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Find Out If Your Design System Is Better Than Nothing – Arseny Smoogly, React Summit 2022
Determine if your design system is truly making a difference or just collecting dust. Learn how to measure adoption, spot waste, and track changes over time to ensure your design system is a valuable asset.
- A design system is not just a collection of components, but a tool that needs to be actively used to make the product better or help deliver it faster.
- To measure adoption of a design system, analyze code usage at a low level, considering both design system imports and homebrew components.
- Homebrew components are low-level components implemented directly in the product code base.
- A more meaningful chart is one that discounts simpler components and biases towards more complex ones.
- A design system without sufficient adoption is a waste of time and effort.
- The adoption success depends on the specific goals and focus of the project.
- A design system is valuable if it displaces the competition in terms of component usage.
- Measure the adoption of a design system based on code usage, not on renderings or user interactions.
- Usage is when a component is referenced in code.
- To run this analysis, use a tool like Radius Tracker, which automates code analysis.
- A design system needs governance to decide what goes in and what doesn’t.
- The size of a code base is not fixed, and it can grow or shrink over time.
- The source mix is independent of project growth, team size, and investment, but it changes over time.
- Total shaded area represents the total usages of components, not unique ones.
- Design system usage share percentage measures how much people prefer the design system over internal or external alternatives.
- Grafana UI reached a state where each new feature uses the same mix of design system components.
- The design system needs to be tracked and monitored regularly to see how it changes over time.
- Non-technical people can’t read code well enough to analyze it manually, so automated tools are necessary.
- The analysis is still valid even if the project grows or shrinks over time.
- A design system without displacement of the competition is not a success.
- Every component usage has a specific usage pattern, and components can be used in different ways.