Design System Coverage

[Look at all these different components.] What variety! And that’s ok! This is the reality of enterprise product design at scale. It reflects the nature of parallel roadmaps, design system team resourcing and bandwidth, business priorities, and many more factors.

A great read, and dose of reality, on design systems.

Some organizations seem to hold up the ideal that, once a design system exists, everything in an interface can and should be built with it. Not only is that an unrealistic goal for most enterprises, but it can often be a toxic mindset that anything less than 100% coverage is misuse of a design system at best or utter failure at worst.

We often use the Pareto principle—often known as the “80/20 rule”—to set an actionable target for teams: aim for up to 80% of any given page to be made of design system components and leave room for 20% of the page to be custom. That remaining 20% is where the invention and innovation can happen. One of our recent clients added some anecdotal and complementary motivation to this: they reported that they spent only 20% of their sprint time creating 80% of their pages with the design system, which then freed up 80% of the sprint time to work on the 20% of custom functionality that really made the experience sing. This is exactly the kind of efficiency that design systems should enable!

This can be a hard thing to get people to understand.

We used to suggest 10% as a starting point, with a plan to work up to 80% eventually, likely over the course of a year or two.