How your startup can save $millions in design and development
I know, it sounds like clickbait, but I’m going to give you the best advice I can, and I’m not going to make you scroll through pages or watch a video. I want to help you. And this one thing really can save you millions in the long run.
As someone who has worked in UX for at a lot of big companies and in UX leadership for startups, the best advice I can give you is “Use an open-source design system”. To be clear, a “design system” is a set of documented UX patterns, UI specifications, and their associated implementations. By using an existing open-source design system, such as VMware’s Clarity (or Material or flutter.io), you can create beautiful, polished products and services incredibly fast.
Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.
Reduce costs — Using a design system, you can avoid current and future costs by building your UI with templates, patterns, and code that’s already developed — just pull the components in and hook them up. But design systems can take years to build, test, validate — so by using an open-source system you can leverage those years, instead, to build your new product.
Increase velocity — Now your dev team might not be into this idea at first, and as fun as it may be for your developers to create their own customized button, and text box, and radio button, and table, and dropdown, it will take them away from building your core product. Imagine the time it will take to build all that base UI code, to QA it all, to document it all, and to revise it all, over and over again. Instead, you want every line of code they write to deliver new value to your customers.
Innovate more — And if your designers say it’s not a big deal to just whip up a quick UI, it’s hard to do it well — or consistently — across screens, features, or products. Picture your designers endlessly debating font weights, slider widths, responsive behavior, dialog patterns, and progress indicators. Because all the time they spend figuring that out will take them away from innovating, from ideating, from researching, and validating all the things that need innovation, ideation, research, and validation. You want all of their creative energy focused on creating frictionless user experiences.
Remove distractions — Lastly, if you are not using a design system, you are opening the door for turf wars between UX designers and UI developers, both of whom are convinced they know what’s right for your users. And having your team members fighting over UI components will NOT help you beat your competition. That conflict will be a distraction, drive division among the ranks, and cause bad blood for months and, if you’re lucky to make it that long as a startup, years to come. The cost of that that distraction will be lost productivity and higher turnover, both of which will reduce your velocity. Three of the four startups that I’ve worked with directly built their own UIs from scratch. But the one that used strictly open-source components was able to pivot quickly, and drama-free.
SO, by using someone else’s UX patterns and UI code, you will increase your velocity, and reduce future tech debt, which will allow your team to focus on getting your new product or service to market faster. By using a publicly available design system, instead of building bricks — every single brick — your team can build skyscrapers.
