Get your design system back on track in three weeks.
Teams in the early stages of building a design system, and need a helping hand.
Mid-size firms (20 to 100 people) with a dedicated team of designers and developers building a digital product.
- Trouble getting started?
You’ve started building a design system, but it’s going slowly and you’re not sure how to proceed. - Questions about governance?
How should you manage the design system team? Should it belong to design, product, development or marketing? What should be the protocols for contributing to the project? - Figuring out what tools to use?
How do you keep different component libraries in sync? What’s the best way to synchronize Figma and Storybook? - Having adoption issues?
How do you involve designers, developers and management from the start, in a way that guarantees that your design system actually gets used? - Wondering how to measure success?
How do you get buy-in from management, and measure success? How do you demonstrate that the project has a positive return on investment?
Here’s how it works.
Every design system project is unique, but usually teams are dealing with similar issues. Our first step is to gather information about your team and your company, and evaluate the status of your project through the lens of Belka’s 5 Pillars of Design Systems.
Based on our review, we prepare a status report with a checklist of recommendations designed to help your team independently move on with the implementation of your design system in a way that fits your goals, organization, resources, and product roadmap.
Based on the goals we’ve agreed upon, Belka’s team will check in with you for a 45-minute session, once a week for 3, 6 or 12 months. We’ll monitor your progress, help you solve issues that come up, and answer your questions. You will also have access to unlimited async support on a dedicated Slack channel.
For us, the hands-on training was crucial. Theory is great, but without practice you never know if you’ve really mastered what you’re doing. The real work starts when you get your hands dirty.
In 2023, Belka interviewed design system teams at 27 companies in Europe and N-America that have successful digital products.
The results surprised us.
In 2023, Belka’s Sara Fazzini and Maria Sole Biondi conducted in-depth interviews with designers, developers and managers at 27 different companies in Europe and N-America.
These companies were at different sizes and at different stages in their product design system journeys, but they had one thing in common: Their digital product was essential for their growth.
The big surprise for us was learning how often these companies’ first attempts at building design systems ended up in failure.
And almost always for the same reasons. So we decided to do something about it.
The Design System Checkup is a service module designed to help companies avoid these mistakes.
Some insights from our research:
- Why isn’t anyone using your design system?
Belka has helped a handful of companies build design systems, from fast growing scaleups to established category leaders.
When you start creating a design system you realize how many issues can come up. With Belka on our team, we were able to quickly address problems and move much faster.
Having a pre-built library of components means designers and developers can save up to 80% percent of the time it takes to develop new features.
More than just a collection of components, a design system is a tool to help teams stay on the same page, communicate better, and make good decisions faster.
By making your design language consistent, a design system improves the consistency of your user interface, making your product easier to navigate.
How do you get there?
We’re moving a lot faster now. Most of our interface components are already in the design system. We just assemble the parts.
The 5 pillars of a successful design system
How to set the right priorities for the design system? How can you plan design system activities in relation to product goals?
What are the tools your team needs to do the job? Do they have the skills they need to master these tools?
How do you structure your team to deliver results? Who should contribute, who should take responsibility, and who should decide?
A design system isn’t just Figma files and Storybook. It’s a set of practices and processes that are actively being used in your organization. How do you communicate and involve the people who’ll use the design system?
Creating a design system takes time and resources, and it must deliver a return on that investment. How do you measure results? How do you communicate the value of the design system to leadership?
When learning about design systems online, one gets easily overwhelmed. Belka shared the right information at the right time so that we could make the right decisions faster.
A team to support you
Design System Checkup
- An analysis based on Belka’s 5 Pillars of Design Systems
- A full report with a roadmap and recommendations
- Weekly 45-minute practice sessions for 3 to 12 month
- Unlimited async support on Slack
- You’ll know where you are in your design system journey
- You’ll have goals and actionable steps to get back on track
- You can immediately put into practice what you are learning
Questions? Answers!
Here are some situations where a design system might be the right thing for you:
- You need to rebuild part of the product or migrate the product to a new framework
- You want to grow your digital product by integrating new features and team members without compromising the delivery time
- You need to implement a rebrand, adapting all product interfaces to a new color palette or typeface quickly and consistently, and you're unsure of the best approach
- You want address inconsistencies across the interface, where some parts of the product differ significantly from others, leading to a poor user experience and resulting in low user satisfaction or brand perception
At Belka we believe that theory does not exist without practice and that a design system that is not applied to your product features is not a successful design system, because it does not really allow you to build interfaces quickly.
Belka helps you beyond the creation of the components, supporting you in the integration of the design system into your product, and in the adaptation of the components, in order to:
- Give you components that are ready to be used tomorrow
- Give you the knowledge and ability to correctly integrate new components into the design system in the future
You will see all stages of the project up close and be actively involved in decision-making on the design system, from start to finish. There is a weekly meeting to make decisions and keep the project moving forward in a healthy way.
This service provides for precise involvement at each stage:
- In the initial analysis phase, when faced with possible inconsistencies in the product, we will ask you for help in understanding which direction to take in terms of component styling
- In the component design phase, we will ask you to help decide which components to design and develop, and to test the components we are building to see if they match your requirements
- In the development phase, to ensure consistency with your development standards, we involve you in reviewing the product code