What is a design system?

A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled to build any number of applications.

Benefits

The time teams spend designing and building is minimized. Instead of building and re-building basic elements, they can spend that time customizing their products to address specific client use cases.

Design (and development) work can be created and replicated quickly and at scale.

The primary benefit of design systems is their ability to replicate designs quickly by utilizing premade UI components and elements. Teams can continue to use the same elements over and over, reducing the need to reinvent the wheel and thus risking unintended inconsistency.

It alleviates strain on design resources to focus on larger, more complex problems.

Since simpler UI elements are created already and reusable, design resources can focus less on tweaking visual appearance and more on more-complex problems (like information prioritization, workflow optimization, and journey management). While this payoff might seem small when you create only a small number of screens, it becomes substantial when you must coordinate efforts across dozens of teams and thousands of screens.

It creates a unified language within and between cross functional teams.

Especially when design responsibilities shift or when teams become geographically dispersed, a unified language reduces wasted design or development time around miscommunications. For example, the functionality or appearance of a dropdown menu would not be debated, since that term is reserved for a specifically defined element within the design system. It can serve as an educational tool and reference for junior-level designers and content contributors. Explicitly written usage guidelines and style guides help onboard individual contributors who are new to UI design or content creation and serve as a reminder for the rest of the contributors.