Looking at the above examples, you can see how they both are basically design systems but are used to solve different things. In the case of MailChimp, they simply wanted to standardize the copy that they are using throughout the product, right from the marketing team to the product team. Whereas, in Material Design, they talk more about the visual behavior that the product needs to support in an end-to-end product building cycle, around documenting the end-to-end UI Guidelines.

Understand your pain points by finding your Villain

In our case, there were 3 villains that we wanted to tackle.

1. Inconsistency

We got a lot of feedback about inconsistency in UI and since there were parallel products under one roof, we wanted all of them to look similar and follow same Visual language, and inherit most of the things from different parts of the product.

2. Inefficiency

We were in a situation where the design and dev teams were spending too much time on reinventing the wheel, which led to inefficient use of time and resources.

3. Collaboration

Our team has been spread across different geo-locations and we sometimes saw slight variations of the same components. So, there was a lack of a single source of truth, and we were having a hard time creating a set of similar looking deliverables.

Do you face the above-listed issues? If the answer is yes, then you definitely need a design system and we’re glad to present what we did, which we hope will help your product as well.

Now, Characterize your Hero

Now since you know all the pain points and have a wide understanding about why you need a design system, and what are the goals or metrics that you want to achieve, it’s time to shape your Design System character and write it’s value proposition, and what your design system is going to solve.

We call our design system Space. Here is a small proposition quote or summarization of what our design system solves for us:

Qubole provides enterprise-grade solutions to big data problems across engines and multiple platforms for varied personas.

To cater to such a large audience and different use cases, we have faced the challenge of reducing complexity and providing a cutting edge user experience.

As we grow further, it becomes necessary to minimize complexity and enhance intuitiveness.

Space, as the name suggests, is conceptualized with the aim to add space to the complexities to designing for such complex workflows.