It’s hard to find a business today that doesn’t rely on digital interfaces, even if you are a traditional brick-and-mortar business, it’s pretty likely that you use software of some sort to run your business.
It’s hard to get it right
As users and creators of digital products, we all know how damn hard it is to get it right. The User Experience (UX) — how easy, enjoyable, and effective the product is — plays a critical role in the success or failure of digital products. Research by Nielsen Norman Group shows that good UX leads to higher user satisfaction and conversion rates, while poor UX results in abandonment and business loss. (source: NNGroup).
When digital products are initially built, they are often (but not always) built from a small team of people, a solo developer, or using an out-of-the-box framework to get the idea off the ground, it never usually launches with a full scale shiny and well developed digital interface that users love from day one.
This is common in the world of digital products, as you move your company from an initial idea to a fully fledged start-up you will be growing your features, improving your offering, maybe even pivoting as you learn and adapt to the user needs.
Fail fast, learn fast = things can get messy
This approach makes sense in the start-up phase: you’re growing, learning, and pivoting based on user needs. Fast iterations help you survive. But when you move from start-up to scale-up, things can get messy. At this stage, digital products often grow without a clear plan or structure, resulting in inconsistent design and tech debt. The idea of “fail fast, learn fast” is widely popularised by figures like Eric Ries (source: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup) and is a valid approach but at some point, you need to fix the foundation — or risk slowing your growth.
You need to learn fast, it’s like a game of chess but you don’t know which piece to play so you just try one.
In these periods of rapid growth the product is normally handled by many people, all with their own ideas. It’s great, all these ideas are valid and useful, and while a micromanaged approach isn’t ideal either, alignment is key.
It takes a whole village to build a startup
Who’s involved in building digital products? If you are lucky, it will be people like Product Managers, Software Engineers and Product Designers working together as part of the ‘Product Trio’ (a concept popularised by Melissa Perri in ‘Escaping the Build Trap’) but often people have more than one hat, and Engineers will help with design, Product Managers will help with UX and Designers set the tone for the styles, layouts and colours that engineers will use, so it’s a collaborative effort.
It’s rare to have a scalable system at this point because you often don’t spend ages building out the plan in intricate detail (rightly so, because it will slow you down), you will have a platform that needs fixing up to help you now go even faster.
Introducing Digital Transformation, aka Design Systems.
Have you heard about Design Systems? Okay, you haven’t been living under a rock, great. While some people might talk about Design Systems, I’d like to focus on what the design system really is: Digital Transformation for your UI.
Just for this article I want you to forget about the word “design” because it can be misleading, although design is not just about making your product look good; sometimes the word design is misleading and people think it is just about what is on the surface, whereas in reality a design system is all about building products that is consistent, scalable, and easy to update — something that benefits everyone, from developers and designers to product managers and even finance teams*.
There are many resources you can dive in to find out more about design systems, but one of the key things to remember right now is that it doesn’t matter what tools you use, we are talking about building systems that help you build for the future, so the toolkit isn’t important right now.
(*Why finance teams? Your current platform could be leaking money if you don’t take steps to check your platform is optimally built since you’re likely paying more than you need to for maintenance and development.)
