Frustrated nobody’s using your Design System? Start by interviewing your people

How many folks out there have built a Design System that didn't end up being used??? 

You can't see me, but my hand is raised really high on this one. Making Design Systems is tough. And getting people to use them is even tougher. 

It can sometimes feel incredibly frustrating. As in, “hey horse, here is some nice, cool water. Why aren't you drinking it?” But often the challenge lies with us, not the other way around.

I work on Design Systems for a living. And sometimes I feel like it’s so obvious to me what a company needs. For example, I may notice that designers and engineers are using twenty different slightly different shades of blue when one will do. The simple answer is to get designers and engineers to use a single shade of blue, right? Wrong.

The real issue isn’t the very obvious surface level problem, it’s something much deeper. The real issue is collaboration. Something is happening (or not happening) between designers and engineers that’s causing these obvious misconnections. The twenty different shades of blue are only the symptom. What we really need to do is to treat the illness.

That’s why the answer isn’t to jump in and fix the ‘problem’. The answer is to figure out what’s going wrong. And to do that, you need to talk to your people. 

In the same way that you can’t build a good product without talking to your users, you can’t build a good Design System without talking to your team. Interview them. And not just designers…they’re only half the equation. Interview engineers and even some PMs for good measure. Your goal here is to understand why collaboration is broken. 

Because the truth is, your team is full of smart, intelligent folks just like yourself. I assure you, they are aware of the twenty different shades of blue. You are unlikely to be the first person to think of it. If the problem has persisted, it’s because there’s something else happening underneath. And it’s your job to do the user testing to figure out what that underlying something is.

So the next time you feel frustrated that your team isn’t using your Design System, ask yourself, what am I missing? Better yet, ask your team.