What to ask your agency about design systems
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on design systems, these questions are worth asking early.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
A shared component set stops every page reinventing the same button. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The system pays for itself around the third or fourth page. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The short version
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about design systems before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- A shared component set stops every page reinventing the same button — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.