The path to a design system

Abstract

Design systems have become prevalent in the modern software industry as a solution to the issues of product inconsistency and development process inefficiency. For an agile team, establishing a design system alongside other product delivery tasks can be challenging due to limited time and resources. However, the concept of the design system and its design process still remain scarce in existing academic research.

From a designer’s point of view, this thesis aims to explore how the design system can be created with agile approaches. From the history of the design system to the practice of agile frameworks, this thesis condenses both academic and industrial knowledge to present a case study regarding the early stage activities and agile methods of design system development. Following a qualitative interview with the case team, this empirical study summarizes the potential merits and demerits of conducting design system within the everyday context of agile teams.

This thesis outlines the importance of integrating design thinking and user research in the agile process to form a sustainable design system. Although agile approaches can effectively accelerate team collaboration and product iteration, teams might lose visions of the user experience if they only concentrate on incremental deliveries. Thus, this thesis suggested shifting the organization culture from time-focus to value-focus to ensure design systems evolve with the user needs.