Design Systems News

Maturity of design systems

Team maturity model for design systems

1. Solitary: “I built a mini-Bootstrap for my team. You should totally use it for your product!”
2. Centralised design system team: "We can help you learn and apply an established system, so let us know what you need. We’ll make more. We are here to serve you."
3. Federated: "It’s not open season; not everyone participates or gets a say. Instead, the federated group’s decisions propagate out to other product teams that leverage the outcome or ignore it at their own peril."

Team Models for Scaling a Design System

Christian Beck's Maturity model

• 1. A System for Efficiency (Startup)
• 2. A System for Consistency (Scale-up)
• 3. A System for Optimization (Enterprise)

Marcelo Somers' Maturity Model

1. Inconsistent: no design system
2. One time: static style guide
3. Manual: exists but needs manual updating

The Path to Design System Maturity

A Maturity Model for Design Systems

Design systems at Airbnb

Code is relatively easy to tie together, and we already have an infrastructure that allows for version control and continuous integration of our applications. Until now though, maintaining Sketch templates relied on manually-intensive human touch points.