Five years ago, only a handful of organizations had a design system in place. Today, almost all organizations have something that can be called a design system; they range from basic documentation sites to complex, multi-system frameworks. Most are somewhere in the early stages of maturity, with inherited workflows from outdated ways of working.
Even an immature design system built on outdated workflows can help digital product teams create better products in less time. However, as design systems and digital production mature, modernizing the design-to-code workflow is essential to setting your organization up for success in both the near and long term.
The Push to Modernize Workflows
In a recent webinar, Andrew Rohman and Richard Banfield walked through the history of digital production workflows, pointing out that until relatively recently, technical constraints meant that UIs were dictated by developers with limited or no design intent. More recently, digital UX/UI has been driven almost entirely by designers, which generally means a better experience for end users but has complicated development and caused timelines and budgets to grow.
Digital production, like any industry, is subject to booms and busts, evolution and revolution. Cultural shifts, economic tightening, and technological advances in machine learning have created an inflection point for digital production and design systems. Digital production must shift workflows away from print production-based models to embrace designing with code, the medium of the final product. Modern design and development capabilities, along with design systems, have made it possible for designers and developers to work more effectively in code, and production workflows must modernize to take full advantage of this; otherwise, organizations risk falling behind and becoming obsolete.
The Tech Bubble Burst 2.0
Over the last two and a half years, central banks around the globe have raised interest rates, creating a ripple effect that has made it harder and more expensive for organizations to borrow money. This new budget consciousness means that most organizations, particularly in the tech industry, have moved from a focus on growth to a focus on consolidation. It also means that competition for corporate and consumer dollars has intensified.
To meet this new competitive pressure, organizations are pushing product teams to put out high-quality products in less time and with fewer people. To do this, teams need to be working more collaboratively, closer to the code, and in fewer or faster design cycles.
AI and the Future of Design Systems
Some people feel like AI came out of nowhere, but those people must have been living under a rock. Machine learning has been around since the 1940s and 1950s. The concept of AI has been a part of popular culture even before we had machine learning, but that doesn’t mean we knew what it would materialize as.
Today’s AI is essentially large language or large multimodal models (LLM/LMM) that have been fed huge amounts of data and use algorithms to learn and improve their analysis and output. Many are designed to do specific things, and some organizations are building AI models that are specific to their individual data sets and needs. These highly trained and highly specialized AIs are expensive, and the LLM/LMMs they use require structured data.
The next step in digital production maturity will involve generative design and hyper-personalization fuled by AI. To reach this level of maturity, organizations need to focus on two key areas: consolidating their data—often necessitating a re-platforming initiative—and establishing seamless connections between design assets and their implementation in code. Organization and production teams that do not have the structure and alignment required to leverage generative technology will be left behind as they become more available and reliable.
The Human Element in Modernizing Design Systems
As with anything, humans are the complicating factor. It is impossible to take advantage of new technology or a new way of working if you don’t get people on board and support their ability to adopt the new system. If your design system is not built in a way that makes it easier to collaborate and work with code, it’s not a system that is built to empower humans to work in the modern world.
How to Build a Future-Proof Design System
While there are many ways to build a basic design system, the best way—and maybe the only way—to build one that can achieve a competitive advantage now and future-proof an organization is by unifying your design and development tools in one centralized source of truth. An essential feature of this centralized workspace is a clear view of what exists in your design and code asset libraries and a 1:1 connection between assets.
Knapsack uses a direct and dynamic connection to help organizations build a design system that empowers developers and designers and delivers on the promise of digital production technology.
- Designers can work in the medium of destination by using existing coded components to create new experiences.
- Developers can spend more time working on what needs to be newly created and less time on rework and updates.
- Collaboration in code and working around a central source of truth reduces friction and accelerates production.
- Working with existing, tested components reduces the QA burden and results in higher quality products.
- A direct and dynamic connection between design and code creates the structured data necessary to leverage AI for research and generative development, setting the stage for innovation and personalization.
An immature design system can help speed up digital production, but only systems that enable collaboration around code are able to modernize production workflows and lay the foundation for a future fueled by generative production.
Ready to future-proof your design system? Discover how Knapsack can streamline your workflows and drive innovation.
