Design systems nobody uses
Most design systems fail at adoption, not at craft. Here is what actually moves the number.
By Sara Lindqvist
A design system is a product with the hardest possible users: your own colleagues. The craft is the easy half. The hard half is adoption, and adoption is mostly a distribution problem dressed up as a quality problem.
The adoption number is the only number
You can ship a beautiful system and have zero adoption. You can ship a mediocre system and have high adoption. The difference is almost never the tokens. It is whether someone made it easier to use the system than to skip it.
- A component that takes a day to find is a component that gets re-built
- Docs that nobody can find are docs that do not exist
- A version bump nobody planned for is a version bump nobody takes
Make the default the system
The strongest lever is to make the system the default path. New project template, default imports, a generator that scaffolds a screen with the right pieces. When using the system is the lazy option, the system wins.
In the cohort we measure adoption for a real system and ship one adoption tactic each week. The tactics that move the number are almost never the ones the team expects.
More reading
- The pipeline after the notebook — 7 min
- Reading an A/B readout — 5 min