Do you use a design style guide to build and maintain your SaaS application?
It can help you design and build more efficiently. You can design for quick and smooth development using your style guide – reuse the building blocks you have and create new ones when needed.
A solid design style guide is a good bridge between design and development.
Great design thrives with limitations. A style guide is a great framework to guide design patterns in a large or growing organisation.
I’ve been reading Dan Mall’s “Design that Scales” which reenforces the point that a design style guide keeps the entire organisation designing in the same direction.
How do you get your company to the point where the style guide is used and understood by everyone?
First it’s important to take stock of your current state of play. Does your company have a style guide, and how mature is it? Does everyone in the company know about it?
Once the style guide is integrated to your company’s process you can start building with it. UX Designers can lean on it to use existing patterns and create new ones, and Developers are confident that they can build those patterns.
You need to be careful not to let the style guide stagnate – it must grow and change with the needs of users. Use Atomic Design (Brad Frost) to break your style guide down to its component pieces, then you can mix them to create molecules and organisms.
A challenge I’ve experienced with style guides is they can go stale and not work for the company’s needs any longer; but it’s often hard to determine when this is happening.
If designs don’t match the style guide, either the style guide needs to be updated or the designs need to be consistent with the style guide.
This leads me to UI frameworks. They are a double edged sword – initially they accelerate the development and design of your application, but further down the road you have to keep it updated and deal with its shortcomings. Is it accessible and does it have all the components you need? If you choose an open sourced framework, it can die and then you’re left with a decision – do we keep using an unsupported framework, find another one, or build our own?
Planning for the future is a part of a good design style guide.
You can “roll your own” UI framework but that also has its own issues – usability (and especially accessibility) are not guaranteed and can get away from your team if not maintained.
A good design style guide lends itself to quick changes – it’s so much easier to go from red buttons to green, for example, when everyone’s using the same code.
Use the building blocks from your style guide to create great things!