How Pinterest’s design systems team measure adoption

In this article, we explain how Pinterest’s design system team measures adoption across design files. We introduce a new metric called design adoption. We use Figma’s REST API to calculate design adoption across all of our files. Our custom tool FigStats calculates and monitors this metric. We shared a way other teams can also utilise our work.

In the article we cover a few different topics: What is design system adoption, and why is it important? Why we couldn’t figure out design system adoption from code aloneand how we built a solution to measure design adoption within Figma.

Adoption of design systems is a common problem that’s shared among many systems. So a lot of teams are eager to find solutions in the space. We chatted with teams ranging from Healthcare to Computer Hardware on the topic, and they were running into similar problems. We found that many teams, including our own, had problems with adoption and completeness. For us, it was especially important because not all of our design components exist in code. Our article  gave teams a way to run our method on their design files and get their own adoption metric.

Our readers were able to walk away with a solution that they could take back and apply to their own system. We found that our method was replicable across different design systems. Adoption measurement is a problem of scale. So using a mix of automation and stats to figure out something that worked for us. That was a pretty unique approach in getting a consistent measure of adoption across teams. That made it appealing because it’s easy for other teams to also make use of.