< back to all blog posts

Finding the right balance between consistency and flexibility for your design system

When you start building design systems, it’s easy to think your design system should ensure consistency in design, aligning every one of your projects so they can all deliver the same experience. Besides, it’s probably one of the main reasons you started building a design system.
However, you may realize that flexibility in a design system isn’t at odds with consistency, especially if you want to prevent your team’s design system from being a living nightmare. So, why is consistency so important in the design, and how do you find the right balance between flexibility and consistency in design systems?

Let’s find out how and why you should build flexibility into your design to level up your system.

In the footsteps of brand architecture

We often think about tools or methods to ensure consistency for our design system. But when it comes to a design system’s foundations, you must remember why you are doing it. Ultimately, it’s all about ensuring your brand will be well applied throughout all your projects. There are a few concepts and lessons from branding to apply to our design systems.

© Clément Diaz

Branded house

A Branded House is the most common form of brand architecture. That way, everything falls under a master brand. This style is exemplified by brands like Google, which have smaller sub-brands, but market and operate them together under a parent brand umbrella.

Sub-brands

Despite being related to the parent brand, sub-brands have a certain level of independence. They have a more distinct product and service lines, and they have their own qualities while still adhering to the parent brand’s values and message. There is a strong visual connection between the main brand and the sub-brands. Among the best examples of sub-brand architecture are Apple and Virgin.

House of brands

As the name implies, a House of Brands is the opposite of a Branded House. A Branded House is focused on a single, well-known and consistent brand, whereas a House of Brands is home to numerous brands, each with its own audience, marketing, look and feel. Procter & Gamble, for instance, does not sell any products directly, but it owns brands such as Crest toothpaste or Bounty paper towels, which are independent brands.

Endorsed brands

In addition to Branded Houses and Houses of Brands, hybrid companies are also relatively common. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are two of the most notable examples. Each company is known for its token products and also owns numerous stand-alone brands. For example, Coke Zero and Diet Coke follow strict brand guidelines and look similar to each other, whereas Sprite has its own brand that looks completely different from Coke.

Blue flexibility character

Design flexibility into systems

As brands, a design system needs to be more flexible if it supports multiple products and businesses, some of which work independently while others work together. There might be different personas, workflows, and even customers for the different products.

The car analogy from Ken Skistimas makes a good metaphor if you need one. It is common for a manufacturer to create a variety of cars to cover a wide range of uses. For example, you might find an SUV for towing the kids around, a sports coupe for weekend fun, and a sedan for weekday commutes. Each serves a slightly different purpose, but they all must work together to keep the family together. The cars’ identities and profiles differ slightly to meet the needs of a broad range of users. Although they differ significantly in terms of design, there are many similarities between them, such as the grill shape, body lines, door handles, and instruments.

The car analogy
The car analogy

This is how a design system can be flexible: you should consider a set of common traits among products when balancing consistency and flexibility. It is mainly a question of positioning your brand, and there is no good or bad answer.

Spotify may be a good example of using a very strict design system because they want to provide the same experience across all platforms for their product. Whether you are on iOS, Android, your computer, or your TV, you know you are on Spotify and using the same product.

Meanwhile, Uber shows a more flexible design system for its ecosystem. Uber Ride and Uber Eats have different branding, and still, you can tell you are using Uber on both of these apps because they decided to keep some specific brand elements that remind Uber’s branding, such as the font or the icons.

Spotify flexibility versus Uber flexibility
Spotify flexibility versus Uber flexibility

Finding the right balance between consistency and flexibility in your design system

Consistency and flexibility are two sides of the same coin. The key to finding a good balance is to understand both. Having consistency builds confidence. It’s easier for people to learn when they understand how things work and how to behave. To ensure consistency, your users need to know what to expect from each interaction. The product will be hard to learn if they don’t have a familiar experience, leading to frustration and churn.

However, consistency might not result in the best user experience for the end users and might hinder the system’s adoption. To give teams the right tools to address their use cases, the system must strike a balance between being consistent and flexible. When enforcing consistency and allowing flexibility, it’s important to consider how people use your product. Understanding this balance will help you determine how flexible your design system should be.

What Google see versus what I see

Creating a design system that supports creativity is essential to reassure people that they’ll still have freedom and creativity, even with a design system. Your design system must be flexible enough to allow experimentation and exploration without feeling constrained by what’s codified. It will be difficult for people to use a design system that limits flexibility.

You can make design changes quickly if you keep things flexible from the get-go without disrupting workflows or upsetting users used to certain elements of the interface being in certain locations. However, it can affect the system’s coherence if too much consistency is forced, as well as if there is too much flexibility.
Getting the right balance between the two requires looking at your organization, your products, and, most importantly, how your users use them.

yellow flexibility character

Why consistency and flexibility are important in design

Once again, when it comes to design systems, the answer is often about humans; in this case, it’s especially about trust.

By making your design system more flexible, you demonstrate your trust in your team. Flexibility and consistency can go hand in hand, and you can have both, but the work is not only technical; it’s cultural. If you want to build a systematic design practice, you’ll have to let go of all the tools, methods, techniques, etc and focus on the people. A successful organization aligns people behind a shared vision, so everyone’s interests and needs match.

Design systems can facilitate alignment, but they cannot create it by themselves. As a result, you will have a flexible system to facilitate innovation while also developing authentically consistent digital products. This is not easy to achieve, and it may take some time to find the right balance. But it’s worth it, and you’ll get a win-win situation: your user experience consistency, internal collaboration, and the vision and team spirit you will build.

If consistency and flexibility are two sides of the same coin, it’s a golden one indeed. The result will be worth all the gold in the world.