With different teams and products, maintaining a unified user experience can be difficult. Design systems are vital for large organizations: They provide consistency and efficiency in UI design for multiple product teams.

Design systems offer reusable components, guidelines, and best practices to streamline design and development. They ensure consistency in branding, typography, color, and interaction patterns. This saves time and effort and enhances the user experience. Design systems also promote collaboration and communication, fostering a design-thinking culture and cohesive visual identity.

Real world analogs

As an explanation for the value of design systems let’s take an analogous real-world example of how they work and scale.

Ikea: Everybody knows Ikea products work beautifully together: in fact, they work so well together that users are almost obliged to buy ALL Ikea products so that they fit snug, and create the overall effect on organisation and aesthetic.

Toyota: Toyota's Total Production System (TPS) is an example of how systems thinking can radically improve efficiencies. Like the TPS, design systems prioritize efficiency, waste reduction, and continuous improvement. By eliminating non-value-adding activities (redesigning components) and employing just-in-time production (component pattern availability), design systems optimize inventory and empower product teams to contribute improvements through "kaizen," resulting in high-quality, reliable, and flexible operations.

Examples of design systems are can be found in my Work page.