Design systems help businesses streamline the product development process and maintain a consistent look and feel across all their digital products. A design system includes a set of standardized building blocks for designers to manipulate, including visual elements and interaction patterns. These systems help to ensure that a company’s users have a cohesive and consistent visual and interactive user experience across multiple digital products or platforms. By providing a structured framework that all teams can understand, design systems improve collaboration between design and development teams.
By providing approved, reusable design elements, design systems help reduce duplication of effort and rate of error, improving product quality and ease of use. These solutions also help organizations maintain brand consistency, which boosts brand recognition and customer loyalty. These systems are mainly used by design, development, and product management teams to facilitate collaboration in the product development process. Design systems integrate with other software involved in the product design and development processes, including design software, prototyping software, integrated development environments, digital asset management software, and project management software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Design Systems category, a product must:
Allow users to create, store, and manage design components and tokens in a centralized library
Store and manage guidelines and usage instructions for components and design elements
Integrate with design, prototyping, and development tools to distribute design elements across workstreams
