CRAFTING EXCELLENT USER EXPERIENCES: A GUIDE TO SEAMLESS DESIGN SYSTEMS
Learn how a unified design system can provide a structured approach for a seamless and user-centric digital experience.
Delivering a consistent, seamless and user-friendly digital experience across all platforms is crucial. In fact, it has the potential to increase revenue by up to 23%.
The challenge lies in consistently delivering value to both business partners and end-users.
To overcome this, adopting a design system can be a great tool, offering a structured approach to design that ensures a coherent, efficient, and user-centric experience.
A design system is a set of rules, components, and guidelines that work together to create a unified visual language.
From color palettes and typography to button styles and interactive elements, every aspect is carefully documented within the design system.
It’s a library of design tokens and components most frequently used such as colours, buttons, dropdowns, text fields, check boxes and so on, all crafted in line with the defined design principles.
It serves as a guide for designers and developers, ensuring a consistent and seamless user experience as well as providing a tangible framework for facilitating discussions and making informed decisions.
WHY INVEST IN A DESIGN SYSTEM?
While building a design system requires investment, it can generate significant value in the long term. There are several good reasons for investing in a unified design system. Here are four of them:
The quality assurance imbedded in the design system ensures a consistent user experience. This consistency builds trust and familiarity and enables user-friendly interactions.
By reusing components and design patterns, the design process becomes more efficient and easier to scale. In fact, A study by Figma, found that designers with access to a design system reached their objective 34% faster than without a design system – that’s a lot of time (and money) saved.
Having a design system with a clear set of rules and guidelines is crucial when scaling the organisation, as it speeds up all processes – development, launch, and training of new personnel. It reduces the risk of bugs and errors and can evolve as your product and company grow.
A design system establishes a collective design language, breaking down silos between development and design. This enables better collaboration, onboarding, and training, creating a unified approach to user experience.
Experience principles to guide your design process
To create a well-functioning and usable design system, it’s important to establish a set of experience guidelines.
These guidelines can help streamline the user experience and provide clear direction during discussions and decision-making throughout the design process.
When defining your experience principles to guide your design decisions, make sure that they are simple, actionable, user-centric, business-minded, and distinctive.
An example
Every time you encounter a delete-dialog in an app or on a website, you’re presented with a choice: Delete or Cancel. While it seems like a simple interaction, it’s a clear example of experience principles in action.
The Delete button is typically designed as the primary action – often coloured in red or another attention-grabbing hue, placed prominently, and positioned to the right. This placement and styling demand more attention from the user, to notify them of the destructive action they’re about to make – this helps guide the user by using colors and style.
In contrast, the Cancel button is usually styled as a secondary action – neutral in colour, less visually dominant, and positioned to the left. It doesn’t trigger the same urgency or instinctive response, making it less likely to be pressed unless the user consciously decides to back out.
This design approach reflects how companies use visual hierarchy and behavioural cues to guide user decisions, even in critical moments like deleting content.
SEAMLESS DEVELOPMENT WITH HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
While design systems are valuable for fostering collaboration between designers and developers, some design concepts are challenging to describe verbally or through static visuals alone. They need to be felt and experienced to be fully understood and thereby getting stakeholder buy-in.
In that case, high-fidelity prototyping, a representation of the interface created digitally using software tools, serves as the bridge between conceptualisation and development.
At IMPACT Commerce we have specialised UI Engineers to secure a smooth communication between front-enders and designers using high-fidelity prototyping.
High-fidelity prototyping provides an interactive platform where both designers, developers and external stakeholders can test and engage with the design, gaining a firsthand understanding of the proposed user journey.
Final word
To truly refine the user experience, designers often need to experiment and play around with different elements.
Building and using a design system is not just a bottom-up approach; it’s an iterative process and requires contextual understanding of your project.
It’s a continuous cycle of creating components, testing them through the design of flows and pages, and refining based on insights gained from practical use.
Because it’s when you actually use the component that you get insight into how to build the right ones.
