Measuring and Messaging Design System Success

Written By Brian Behrend

It is not always easy to get the people who sign the checks to understand the value of investing in a design system, "I'm spending how much per month on something no customer will ever see?" While explaining the value of improved quality, consistency, and user experience is a good starting point, it is important to be able to communicate the value and successes of your design system in multiple ways.

Having hard numbers on the value your design system is bringing to the organization is useful both with existing clients as well as when discussing design system engagements with potential clients. Information on when and how product teams are using (and not using) the design system is also critical to being able to define an informed and successful design system product roadmap.

A strategy for collecting and reporting key metrics is needed for each design system engagement.

Measuring quantitative value

Understanding which teams are using which components is the first step in being able to accurately report on any other quantitative metric. Developing a plan and a technical solution for tracking this key information before a full scale rollout will set you up for being able to communicate trends over time and start talking early on about the impact the design system is making. Learn more about Calculating Design System Adoption.

Cost savings
Using average employee (or consultant) cost, the number of team members (designers and developers) using the system, and expected efficiency gains you can calculate the cost savings the system delivers per employee.

Formula: Average resource cost * Number of users * Efficiency gained
Example: $150,000/yr * 25 employees * 10% = $375,000 savings per year

Time Savings
While the complexity of individual components obviously varies, the amount of time saved each time a design system component is reused versus designing and building a new component from scratch.

Formula: (Hours for new design/build - Hours to implement) * Times used
Example: (56 hrs - 8 hrs) * 20 users = 960 hours saved per simple component

Capturing qualitative impact

Survey results
Just like we can use surveys to track customer sentiment about our other products, we can also collect feedback from our design system product's customers. Build up an email list of actual users of the design system (designers, developers, product owners) and reach out to them on a regular basis with your survey tool of choice.

Some questions you might ask would be around quality of documentation, ease of use, ease of contribution, and/or the number of components they're using. You can also ask general sentiment questions, open input feedback questions, and try to collect info on future roadmaps.

Quality and accessibility improvements
Work with the QA and research teams on the project to understand existing quality and usability testing procedures. The goal will be to attempt to baseline the amount of time and number of issues identified before the design system is in place, and then understand the impact of the design system on those results.

Are there fewer rounds of design revisions? Fewer bugs in dev stories? Higher quality feedback in usability testing?

Get involved with these teams and get regular numbers and feedback from them. These results can be shared with stakeholders and just as importantly used to identify opportunities for improvement.

Customer experience
Ultimately, the goal of a design system is to help teams make better products. Making efforts to track the impact on the overall customer experience before and after adopting the design system can also be valuable.

Have customer satisfaction scores improved? Is churn rate down? Is the product's NPS score trending in the right direction?

While tough to measure direct impact, there are opportunities here to understand how individual product teams are measuring success and sharing the change in those values as part of your design system success story.

Messaging success

Now that we have some ideas about the impact the design system is making, we definitely don't want to keep that to ourselves. Sending out regular updates about the design system's impact should be a part of a broader design system communication strategy. Our different stakeholders each need to be kept in the loop with what is happening with the design system

Monthly marketing emails
Sending out regular monthly update emails with details of the latest new features, success stories, and metrics to a broad audience including client executives is a great way to keep the most people in the loop. Including graphs of the latest adoption rates and other data visualization of your metrics will help make these numbers stand out at a glance.

Design System blog
Colocated with your design system documentation, a frequently updated design system blog is a great method for organic promotion of what's going on in and around the design system. In addition to updates on the latest updates and upcoming releases, mix in regular posts featuring adoption trends and success metrics. Encourage contribution from product teams or write up product success stories for additional

Release notes
Historically primarily a developer resource, release notes and developer changelog files should also have links (at the bottom so they don't get in the way of technical details) to the design system blog to help users looking at the codebase stay in the loop about the latest releases and successes.

Office hours
Collaborative office hours sessions are a critical sharing and support opportunity. In addition to giving teams a forum to ask questions and get updates, sharing the latest metrics and scheduling regular show and tell sessions for product teams to share what they've been working on is a great way for all teams to hear about what has been working (and what hasn't.)

So where to start?

All this may seem like a lot, especially considering you've also got a design system to actually design and build. Start small and collect whatever information you can starting as early as you can. As long as you have the data, sending out a regular update email promoting the design system requires no infrastructure other than Outlook and a list of email addresses. Set a cadence for sending emails and stick with it and you'll be off and running in no time (and now everyone will know about it.)

References and additional reading

Brian Behrend
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