Measuring the value of our Design System
We recently achieved a significant milestone of saving 300,000 hours of product design and development time through the use of our design system. By tracking metrics such as engagement, efficiency, adoption, and speed, we are able to measure the impact of the design system and communicate its benefits to stakeholders.
Thanks to the power of our progressive metrics approach, we’ve recently hit a milestone of saving 300,000 hours of product design and development time via our design system, Construct Kit. It’s a really substantial return on investment for us and a pivotal point in our four-year journey of building our next generation design system.
How we’re measuring impact
In order to quantify the effect of our design system at REA, we track a few metrics across a variety of systems and communicate 4 pillars to our stakeholders.
Engagement: Systems using the latest major version for each platform
Efficiency: Developer hours saved since Construct Kit started (2018)
Adoption: Subscribers’ engagement via the adoption of new component releases
Speed: Products delivered faster to market requiring fewer developer days
Aligning systems to strategic initiatives
Since the introduction of design systems, there has been a debate that a system inhibits creativity and does not allow designers to innovate. Personally, I feel that a design system can unlock creative vision and enable innovation.
Here is a look back at our website realestate.com.au one year ago, let me share our creative process and journey on how we achieved this visual identity experience uplift.
To achieve our goal to create a unified world-class experience that people love, we underwent a major experience uplift initiative. To do this, we needed to make a change in the creative direction of our core product experience. Now, this entails an incredible amount of effort and many teams to update designs and code bases. However, if you make the change at the design system level you can save a great deal of effort and get to market faster. In addition to creating a more overall cohesive experience for the end user.
Fast forward to today and this is a look at our product experience with our new creative direction applied. We achieved this by making the change at the system level. We updated our core foundations in our design system, that being our typography, colour and styles like corner radius and shadows etc. I feel that the new direction reflects our brand personality and brings a more cohesive world-class experience.
After making the change at the design system level we were then able to update the existing production experience which had already adopted our design system. Furthermore, we helped empower product feature teams to roll out the new look and feel across their experience.
Key takeaways
We were able to show value and ROI in terms of efficiency, communication, collaboration, and speed to market. Metrics such as engagement, efficiency, adoption, and speed help measure its impact and demonstrate the benefits to stakeholders. We proved that the design system does not hinder creativity but rather fosters innovation. By implementing changes at the system level, we achieved a cohesive user experience and empowered product teams.