Security is a major concern for any organization, regardless of size, but for enterprise organizations that deal with private or sensitive information, security is mission critical. With the proliferation of digital products and the need for constant software and user interface (UI) updates, how can digital product teams maintain security and consistency across the product ecosystem they are accountable for?
It’s a complicated problem with a relatively simple fix.
Leverage your design system and digital production operations platform to build more secure products that are easier to maintain.
Admittedly, this does assume a few things:
- Your design system is not just a docs site. Documentation is helpful to understanding when and how to use a component or interface, but on its own it does little to help speed up the process.
- Your design system includes a consolidated library of well-crafted, secure UI components. Code is what makes a design reality and if you can start the design process for digital products with proven, reusable components you are already starting for a more secure foundation.
Let’s dig a little deeper into how a design system and the right digital production operations platform can help you build more secure and maintainable digital products.
Why You Need A Secure UI Component Library
Code is the foundation of our digital reality, the building block of the websites, applications, and devices we are increasingly reliant on to do even the simplest of things. Without considered and artfully crafted code underpinning them, digital products become unreliable, buggy, sometimes dangerous places that erode consumer trust.
Understanding this, it is essential that product, engineering, and design leaders prioritize the consistent use of components and user interfaces that are built with security concerns in mind.
Design systems help catalogue and understand what you already have to work with. An effective and well-maintained design system should be able to consolidate what exists into a relatively small number of components and interface patterns that can be deployed to create consistent, easily updated digital products. Creating this consolidated component library might require a concerted effort by the design system team, but it’s well worth the effort and the benefits reach far past security concerns.
Not all design systems or digital production operations platforms are created equal and some make this task easier than others. The most effective platforms allow designers and developers to build with these components. Working directly with pre-built and pre-tested code means there is less new code to test, fewer bugs, and fewer security gaps to worry about.
That doesn’t mean you won’t have to build new components or add new code from time-to-time, but if you start with what you have and know works, you start from a stronger, more secure foundation.
How Standardized UI Components Reduce Maintenance Complexity and Risk
Code needs maintenance and interfaces need updating. Imagine you need to update a few lines of code that have been used to build a particular kind of component across numerous products in your ecosystem. Unfortunately, the component was custom built for each product because the product team didn’t use the standardized secure UI components in the design system library. Instead of being able to update the standardized component’s code and deploy the fix, your engineering team now needs to track down every instance of this code in the custom built components and manually update it.
This kind of thing happens all the time, and it’s not limited to code. What if you need to add a new security disclaimer to all of your log in components but each product uses a different component to do this? Every time your product teams use a custom component or interface, they increase the maintenance burden of that product. Using fewer, standardized components and interfaces makes updating and maintaining products easier, faster, and more consistent. How much time, effort, and cost would that save your organization?
Reducing Ambiguity: Why Contextualized Documentation Matters
Like compliance or accessibility, security concerns often need to be called out explicitly in documentation to help designers, product managers, and engineers understand what standards need to be met. But as helpful as it may be to have a few paragraphs or a bullet list to guide you, contextualizing your requirements by placing them alongside a visualization of the Figma designs or live code renders is far more effective.
By contextualizing your documentation—whether it’s guidelines, specs, or requirements—alongside visual components, you drastically reduce ambiguity. Here’s how it benefits key team members:
- For Designers: Seeing Figma files directly in the documentation ensures that design intent is clear and consistent. Designers can quickly reference how components should look and behave, eliminating guesswork. They can also see how their designs map to the final product, which reduces discrepancies and minimizes rework.
- For Developers: Live code renders provide an interactive view of the component in action, allowing developers to quickly understand how it behaves, its responsive capabilities, and any built-in security features.
Not many design systems are able to provide contextualization of documentation and components in the way. Storybook and Knapsack are really the only two that allow for this, and of the two, only Knapsack makes maintaining that documentation easy.
Through dynamic connections between design and code source files, and a variety of integrations and embeds, Knapsack allows for automatic updates to documentation. It doesn’t eliminate all documentation maintenance, but it reduces it considerably and provides a robust way to capture relevant information.
How to Build More Secure Digital Products, Faster
Having a library of secure UI components and robust, contextualized documentation is extremely helpful for product teams. In addition to reducing ambiguity, these resources can speed up the digital product development process by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done. But the thing that supercharges the productivity and speed of teams is the ability to rapidly prototype with production-ready code.
Prototyping allows teams to validate concepts, iterate quickly, and align stakeholders early in the development cycle. However, traditional prototyping often involves creating mockups that need to be rebuilt during development, leading to wasted effort and potential inconsistencies.
Knapsack's unique architecture allows teams to consolidate all of their tools and resources into one unified digital product operations platform, enabling teams to prototype using production-ready code. This approach eliminates redundant work, ensures alignment between design and development, and speeds up the transition from prototype to production.
With cloud authoring and feedback tools, teams can collaborate in real-time, gathering input and iterating on designs instantaneously. Integrated CI/CD pipelines ensure that prototypes undergo rigorous testing throughout the process, allowing teams to address potential security or performance concerns early in the development process. By reducing back-and-forth and ensuring every prototype adheres to design and security standards, Knapsack empowers teams to deliver secure, high-quality digital products faster.
Building On A Secure Foundation
Leveraging the right platform can be a game-changer for building secure, maintainable, and scalable digital products. By consolidating components and ensuring that security is baked into the design from the outset, organizations can significantly reduce risk while improving efficiency. Knapsack not only simplifies this process but empowers teams to move faster with confidence, knowing that every update is secure and seamlessly integrated across products.
Join our next live demo to see how Knapsack can transform your team's approach to secure product development.
