Design Systems FAQs: Your questions answered

We support clients at various stages of their Design System journey. That could mean:

• Helping to make the case for funding a new Design System

• Supporting user research and building repeatable models

• Creating clear governance and tooling processes

• Aligning stakeholders across brand, marketing, product, dev, and compliance

• Producing internal comms or training materials

• Helping with adoption through onboarding sessions and partner enablement

We’ve seen that Design Systems work best when they’re understood, shared, and supported across the whole organisation, not just the design team.

We always encourage our clients to focus on outcomes, not just deliverables.

We help define meaningful KPIs that measure:

• Speed to market

• Adoption rates

• Time/money saved

• Accessibility scores

• Reduction in dev bugs and inconsistencies

• Ease of feature rollout

Often, clients need help documenting the why behind their Design System. Once that’s clear, we align metrics to those goals and use them to guide decisions throughout the process, so you’re not endlessly tweaking things that don’t matter to users.

Setting up a robust Design System takes collaboration between a few key disciplines:

• User Research, UX and Design to create usable, accessible components

• Business Analysts and Product Managers to ensure it meets business needs

• Developers to create coded components and working prototypes

• DesignOps and QA to maintain quality, documentation and consistency

It’s vital to involve development early and keep design and dev closely aligned throughout. The team also needs to stay focused on outcomes — delivering a usable, flexible system without accruing unnecessary technical debt.

A mix of ‘net new’ feature work, refinement, and innovation is ideal. (For context, net new refers to completely new functionality — not iterations on existing components.)

In our experience, common pitfalls include:

• No alignment between teams (Design, Dev, Product all pulling in different directions)

• Governance is too light — or too heavy-handed

• Poor internal communication and lack of training

• Senior leadership changes or conflicting priorities

• A belief that certain markets or brands have “special” needs that can't be addressed

Most of these issues come down to miscommunication or lack of understanding. That’s why involving people early and often and showing progress regularly is so important.

We usually start by agreeing a set of guiding principles. These serve as a compass when it comes to balancing creative freedom with scalable design.

We also recommend structuring workstreams to support both BAU and innovation — so teams rotate between optimisation, refinement and fresh feature work.

Creative teams and agency partners often push back against Design Systems because they fear losing control. Involving them early and showing how flexible a well-built system can be goes a long way to building trust.

We always encourage a base level of standards, such as:

• Accessibility compliance

• Mobile-first design

• Organisation-specific brand or UX principles

On the governance side, it’s crucial that there’s a clear process for raising requests or questions. If teams can’t find what they need, or don’t understand the system, they’ll work around it — and you lose the consistency you worked so hard to build.

Approachability is important, but so is structure. Be open, but set boundaries.

When versioning design work we primarily use a combination of ZeroHeight and Figma to create numbered or named releases. We also prepare release notes alongside the new components to enhance understanding, and publish it at the point when the components become available for use in the CMS and other design files.

Where possible, having a close alignment between when the design system updates are made and when the new components are actually available to use by teams is important. We also recommend making your roadmap public to manage expectations.

Leaders are critical to long-term success. Their role is to:

• Communicate the benefits of the Design System across the business

• Secure funding and resources for ongoing work

• Set KPIs and keep the team focused

• Support research and iteration beyond the initial release

• Share success stories and bring the wider business on board

• Ensure the Design System becomes part of the organisation’s wider processes

Without strong leadership support, Design Systems risk becoming “just another project.”

We’ve supported organisations using this approach, but structure is key.

If you’re opening the system up to a wider community (internal or external), you need governance in place before that happens. Otherwise, you risk being swamped with feature requests that add no value or dilute the system’s purpose.

Handled well, a community-led Design System can be a great source of ideas. But make sure there’s a process for prioritising and reviewing what gets added.

Done right, a Design System will:

• Create scalable, consistent HCP digital experiences

• Accelerate delivery across teams and markets

• Reduce duplication, bugs and wasted effort

• Improve accessibility, performance and brand trust

• Support long-term digital growth for pharma organisations

Read more about reasons to invest in a Design System here.