The future of design systems…into 2023

It’s always interesting to step out of the day-to-day work of design systems and imagine where things might go over the next year or so: what problems might be solved next? As it’s coming up to the end of the year, it feels like a good time to put on our forward-thinking hats and gaze into the future with some of our design system peers!

With every design systems journey I hear, I learn a lot about the different hopes and aspirations that people have. There are a lot of familiar challenges that we all face, that we solve with our own twist. Looking at what these thoughts about what people are interested or excited for gives me that same feeling – that through their observations, I’m even more eager to see what 2023 might bring!

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Jess Paris

Senior Manager, Anvil Design System, Creative, & DesignOps @ ServiceTitan

There are two thought areas that I’m very excited to see coming more and more into the design systems space. Although I could go on and on!

The first is more pragmatic, and that is evolving from being tied to a specific framework into a more “system of systems” approach. This allows us to scale by creating a core, or foundational, library that holds color, type, spacing, motion, documentation, accessibility guidance, etc. This core space sets the tone for standardizing design thinking for your brand, while still allowing for creative freedom and customization across local libraries for apps and products. Moving from design systems thinking associated with strict guidance and visual styles, to what’s “required” for our product’s look and feel, design systems teams are able to share that responsibility with consumers, instead of setting strict rules. This also promotes scalability; creating a platform and styling-agnostic system that supports wider business initiatives such as redesigns and acquisitions.

Another more innovative topic that I’m excited to hear discussion around is how we can incorporate AI into design systems. Starting small, what if your designers chose the basic components for a screen, and the system suggested associated components to help build out the experience further? For example, a designer places a data grid on a screen, and is notified by the design system of additional components such as pagination, and a drawer for drill-in display? Thinking bigger, what if your system built on that and also offered layout suggestions tailored to device? What if additional patterns suggested were rooted in known user research and behavior? Or what might be needed on follow-up screens? I would love to see that in action one day!

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Dan Mall

Design Systems expert

I think we’ll see more design system teams start to narrow their focus. Rather than trying to cover every use case imaginable, design systems will hone in on the decisions that matter most at scale. I think that’s why we’re seeing a ramp-up in interest of things like design tokens and less of a focus lately on components (aside from allowing designers and engineers to create their own components from a common base).

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Inayaili Leon

Staff Program Manager at GitHub

I think design systems are going to continue to become more automated where possible, especially when it comes to documentation, which is still where a lot of systems are lacking. I see design systems as one tool in the landscape of what’s available for teams to produce beautiful, and high quality user experiences and the tendency is for their maintenance to be less of a burden.

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Shaun Bent

Engineering Manager at Spotify

Algorithms – I think we will see more and more teams leaning into powering their design systems using algorithms for the generation of design tokens. Be that algorithmically generated accessible colour palettes or scalable layout systems.

Native Mobile – I believe we’ll see more companies investing in creating native mobile design systems. Currently, the design system space is dominated by web, and almost all conversations about design systems are in the context of web technology. I’d like to see and hope that conversation will shift and we will see native mobile design systems becoming a hot topic in the design system space.

Automation – Building on the idea of algorithms, I think we will see more teams investing in automation with their design system, using bots and scripts to automate tasks like syncing design tokens between code-based sources of truth and design files for example.

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Erin Fanning

Senior UI Designer

I’m excited about the future of design systems, but also feel unsure of them. They are SO big. This makes it exciting as it’s now a well known thing in companies, but also might be challenging as they all start to blend together. I think what excites me is seeing how much a design system touches and how much of an impact it has across an organisation, and how much it helps alignment and opens the door for more creative solutions. I think this can also be a struggle though. There’s always the question of how do we stay creative while following a design system. I will always love how we can incorporate ethic, accessibility, inclusivity and so on into our design systems and how can improve upon this and hopefully this will grow more and more in 2023 and become common practice just as much as other documentation and consideration. A never ending challenge is the justification/alignment with stakeholder and stakeholder ultimate decisions that conflict with design system direction.

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Henry Daggett

Design Systems Lead

Discourse wise, I’m definitely noticing how a few topics seem to rotate: buy-in, contribution, naming (is Design System even a good name?!), so I’m sure the rotation will continue.

As to new challenges – I think a lot of teams will be reaching the re-funding stage; where the initial value has been realised and the System is quite stable/well adopted, so management might be thinking to themselves, “We can cut the funding, right?”.

I also think the system-design mindset is spreading to other aspects of product, especially patterns. I expect more Design patterns, Business patterns, Product patterns etc.

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Jerome de Lafargue

CEO

One of the most exciting challenges in the space right now is helping teams articulate the value of their design systems to stakeholders through data, analytics, and better communication tools around design systems. To endure, design systems require top-down cultural change, and data + communication are how to make that cultural change happen.

Another exciting challenge is making the idea that a design system is “design-led” or “engineering-led” obsolete since that concept itself perpetuates silos. The most successful design systems are equal design/engineering partnerships, and I hope that 2023 is the year where methodologies like design tokens, as well as deeper integrations into both the design and engineering environments, deprecate this false dichotomy!

Erin Rademacher

Design Systems & Technologies Manager at Apple

My dream is to see a lot more automated continuous integration. On the dev side, we kind of call it pushed on green, and I would just love to have some formalization of some checks.

Like, we know certain things, but either on the design or the code side. Let us add that, you know, create a script of some kind and just kind of automate a lot of the end portion of getting things published to your library or, you know, like you’re feeding your design systems website.

I don’t want to think about it; I want my team to think about that. I just want it to kind of happen, like push the button, and it happens.

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Donnie D’Amato

Design Systems Architect

I cannot anticipate what will happen but I’d like to see more areas where technology takes tasks away from people. Design systems should be supporting design in the quest to discover the best ways for our users to achieve their goals efficiently. As a result, the role of product design should transform into less of a production role and more of a strategic one.

What I’d really like to see is less. Less maintenance of documentation in favor of smarter integrated tools. Less quibbling about what grid or breakpoint sizes to use in favor of truly responsive experiences with document flow. Less disruptive design in favor of meeting user expectations. Less time spent in siloes making stone tablets and more time on the design system campaign trail.

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Robert Laschevoski

Senior Product Designer

Design tokens documentation and automation would be the topic of the following year.

Collaboration can show up too mixing with those topics, Design system fails is something the every one keep it quiet but would be nice to explore

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Geri Reid

Lead Designer, NewsKit Design System

The future is eliminating repetitive tasks through automation. At NewsKit, we’re building on our Figma plugins that allow theming across multiple brands to allow designers to push their theme changes through to code. Designer/developer handover is also an area ripe for automation. Manually speccing out design files is a time suck when a plugin can compare your spec to the base component and specify overrides.

Design systems teams are often the accessibility advocates in an organisation. This will only increase as systems automate the checkbox stuff. We’re already seeing design systems that programmatically determine which tokens to apply to meet WCAG contrast ratios.

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To wrap up, I thought I’d check in with ChatGPT and confirm something we might’ve been wondering… Do you think AI could ever replace designers and developers working on design systems?

“It’s unlikely that AI will be able to fully replace designers and developers who work on design systems in the near future. While AI has made significant progress in many areas, it still requires a high level of human expertise and creativity to design effective user interfaces and design systems.”

…so that’s comforting!

Big thanks to everyone that was able to contribute! It’ll be interesting to see where things are at towards the end of next year and see what came to pass.

Let us know about your hopes/ideas of what you’re looking forward to in 2023 over on Twitter @zeroheight or in our Slack community, zheroes!