The world is full of conflicting truths. For example, it’s generally true that the more ideas you have to work with, the better the outcome. It’s also true that too many ideas can overwhelm the process, leading to misalignment and inefficiency. This paradox applies to digital product development. The more people who can contribute to shaping digital experiences, the more innovative, accessible, and effective those experiences can be. But without the right structure, we risk introducing inconsistencies that compromise brand integrity, along with increased complexity that slows production and drives up costs.
That’s why Knapsack is introducing the Consumer role to our platform. It strikes the right balance between open collaboration and structured governance, allowing more team members to leverage your design system while ensuring its integrity. This means digital product teams can scale design system adoption efficiently without sacrificing quality, speed, or consistency.
Organizational Benefits of Knapsack’s Consumer Role
Extending the ability of your digital production teams to leverage your design system has far-reaching benefits that directly contribute to the success of your organization and the health of its bottom line and revenue. The Consumer role allows organizations to:
- Expand Collaboration: Design system Consumers can access and iterate with design system assets, democratizing the design process and enhancing cross-functional teamwork.
- Increase Productivity: Consumer role users can compose and prototype with design system components to quickly identify gaps, enabling designers and developers to prioritize and focus their efforts.
- Accelerate Speed-to-Market: Empowering Consumer role team members to work with pre-approved, production-ready design system components gives digital product teams a head start, minimizes QA and compliance concerns, and significantly reduces production timelines.
- Ensure Consistent User Experiences: Expanded use of standardized design system components by Consumer team members ensures design consistency across projects, protecting brand integrity at scale while improving the maintainability of product ecosystems.
- Safeguard Workflows: Guarded by the appropriate access and permissions, Consumers can create, iterate, and request reviews without jeopardizing the integrity of the design system or digital products.
By empowering more team members to participate in the design process, the Consumer role makes it easier to scale design system use—enhancing collaboration, productivity, and consistency across an entire organization.
Who Is Knapsack’s Consumer Role For?
The Consumer role is best for anyone outside of the design system team involved in the creation, implementation, and maintenance of digital experiences, products, or properties. Some examples include:
- Digital Product Owners – Responsible for managing product roadmaps and implementing new features. Digital product owners benefit from a crystal-clear understanding of what can be delivered today, making it easier to prioritize high-value work across teams.
- Digital Marketers – Develop and maintain websites, landing pages, and email experiences. Digital marketers benefit from the ability to rapidly develop production-ready landing pages and experiences using existing coded components, layouts, and theming capabilities.
- Copy/Content Teams – Responsible for developing content ranging from microcopy to long-form articles to regulatory requirements. These teams benefit from the ability to layout and test content within the actual coded experience, ensuring proper fit, readability, and compliance across screen sizes.
- QA/Testing Teams – Responsible for ensuring standards are met—from accessibility to performance to analytics—before experiences ship to production. These teams benefit from centralized access to cross-platform implementations, enabling early-stage QA testing and reducing late-stage issues and delays.
- UX/UI Designers – Responsible for defining the user experience intent and collaborating with engineering teams to deliver the intended experience. UX/UI designers benefit from getting hands-on with existing coded components within real environments, allowing them to validate assumptions, inform design decisions, and reduce design scope while minimizing downstream issues.
These are just a few of the use cases we see the Consumer role addressing. More will undoubtedly emerge as teams expand design system adoption and consumer abilities grow.
What Can Knapsack Consumers Do?
The Consumer role provides team members with controlled access to Knapsack’s design system, enabling them to:
- View design system assets, components, and documentation to ensure alignment with best practices.
- Create their own branches of Knapsack to experiment and iterate with existing, reusable design system components.
- Use design tokens, themes, and collections to edit and refine design system components within their branches.
- Compose and prototype working UIs to test, refine, and share ideas with their teams.
- Request reviews and provide feedback to foster collaboration and improve workflows.
- Invite new users to join Knapsack with Consumer or Viewer permissions, expanding adoption while maintaining governance.
Knapsack’s Consumer Role in Action
If you’d like to learn more about Knapsack’s Consumer role and how it can help your organization work more effectively, register for one of our upcoming live sessions, "Composition & Prototyping at Scale: How Teams Can Build Faster with Your Design System" for a deep dive into the capabilities and use cases the Consumer role unlocks.
Select your preferred date below and register to attend.
Wednesday, March 19th at 11 AM ET | 8 AM PT
Monday, March 24th at 3 PM ET | 12 PM PT
