UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · Design Systems and Component Libraries
Governing and Evolving a Design System Over Time
A design system without a genuine, deliberate process for making and communicating changes tends to fragment over time, as different individual contributors each make their own reasonable-seeming local decisions that collectively undermine the very consistency the system was originally built to provide.
A design system with no clear, deliberate process for proposing, reviewing, and communicating a change tends to fragment gradually as different individual contributors, each acting reasonably from their own local perspective, independently create a slightly different variation of an existing component to solve their own specific, immediate need, rather than proposing a genuine, deliberate improvement to the shared, central system that every team member would then actually benefit from and use consistently going forward.
- A design system with no clear process for changes tends to fragment as contributors each create their own reasonable-seeming local variations rather than proposing shared improvements.
- A sustainable system establishes a clear process for who can propose, approve, and communicate a change to the shared system.
- Versioning a design system like a shared code dependency lets teams adopt a change on their own timeline, rather than being forced to update instantly and simultaneously.
- A healthy system needs a deliberate process for deprecating outdated components, not only adding new ones, or it accumulates confusing, redundant choice over time.