January 2, 2025
Discover how component-driven design systems boost efficiency, scalability, and consistency in digital design, transforming workflows and user experiences.
Keir Bradshaw | EVP, Solutions
Delivering digital experiences that are consistent, scalable, and efficient is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a necessity. A component-driven design system offers a powerful solution that streamlines design and development by reusing blocks, eliminating redundancy, and ensuring visual and functional consistency.
What Is a Design System?
Similar to a LEGO set, a design system is built on the principle of combining structure with creativity. Just as a LEGO set comes with instruction booklets showcasing creations, design systems include templates for key pages, such as a homepage, landing pages, or service pages. These templates provide clear guidance, ensuring a consistent and cohesive framework.
Beyond the templates, design systems also offer a comprehensive suite of building blocks that allow for customization. Whether a web admin needs to develop a microsite or a department requires a unique service page, these reusable components make it possible to address specific needs without sacrificing brand consistency or user experience. Like our LEGO set, you may use these building blocks in ways the original designer couldn’t predict.
Design systems also streamline workflows, breaking down silos and bottlenecks to help teams deploy updates quickly with pretested, optimized components. This approach minimizes reliance on programmers and reduces redundant efforts, making it easier to maintain brand consistency at scale while lowering costs. The outcome is a unified, efficient process that enhances the experience for both creators and users.
Design systems ultimately empower brands to scale effectively, adapting to future demands across various digital channels and devices. This approach delivers a modern solution that combines flexibility, usability, and long-term growth in a cohesive framework.
The Hidden Limits of Template-Based Design
Template-based designs may offer quick solutions and simplicity; however, they often present long-term challenges across user experience and the technological foundation of a website. These challenges include:
Design Systems Meet Growing User and Organizational Needs
For brands looking to scale, design systems are a crucial component of the puzzle. They break traditional limits by streamlining workflows, cutting costs, and ensuring cohesive, scalable digital experiences. By fostering innovation and consistency, design systems position brands for long-term success in a fast-evolving landscape.
Below, we outline eight ways design systems unlock growth opportunities and elevate brand potential.
#1 – Consistency Across Platforms: A design system ensures that all digital products (emails, landing pages, mobile apps, etc.) maintain a unified look and feel, enhancing brand recognition and user familiarity across various platforms.
#2 – Improved Efficiency: By creating a repository of reusable components and templates, design teams can significantly reduce duplication of effort, allowing faster development and iteration cycles.
#3 – Scalability: As organizations expand, a design system enables easy scaling of design efforts by establishing guidelines that help onboard new team members and maintain quality control. With design systems, there is less chance that users run into configurations that don’t work.
#4 – Adaptability and Longevity: A well-structured design system can evolve to incorporate new tools, trends, and technologies. This ensures the design approach remains relevant and effective as the digital landscape shifts. Design systems also enable organizations to make macro and micro changes broadly. For example, if your organization adopts a new brand palette, a design system can make these changes globally.
#5 – Enhanced Collaboration: Design systems foster better communication between designers, developers, and stakeholders, providing a common language and framework that facilitates collaboration and leads to more cohesive outcomes.
#6 – User-Centered Design: By embedding user research and usability guidelines within the design system, teams can ensure that all digital interfaces are built with the user in mind, ultimately leading to improved satisfaction.
#7 – Reinforced Brand Strategy: By embedding brand values within a design system, organizations can create a cohesive narrative across all products, ensuring that every touchpoint reflects the brand’s mission and vision effectively.
#8 – Faster Prototyping and Onboarding: With pre-designed components readily available, teams can quickly create prototypes, and new team members can more easily acclimate to the organization's design processes and standards. Design systems also enable teams to create quick mock-ups, bypassing the need for traditional wireframes.
How Design Systems Enable ADA Compliance
Poor ADA compliance is a major issue that can result in legal action, and it may also prevent users who are not fully abled from completing basic website tasks. This is bad for both the user and your brand. ADA compliance can be measured using the WCAG standard, which gauges accessibility to ensure digital content is usable for everyone.
Design systems enable ADA compliance by providing a structured approach to creating accessible, consistent, and user-friendly designs. Standardizing elements such as color contrast, navigation, and form usability ensures that digital experiences meet WCAG guidelines. Not only does this fulfill legal and ethical obligations, but it also enhances the overall user experience and broadens audience reach.
Design System Use Case: Baptist Health
In 2019, Baptist Health was seeking an Enterprise Digital Experience Platform to help its team leverage a multilingual approach within a component-based design system. Baptist Health partnered with MERGE to evaluate the platform of multiple vendors, ultimately leading to Sitecore being selected as the platform of choice.
MERGE oversaw the environmental planning and migration of Baptist Health’s website and campaigns from SharePoint 2010 to Sitecore XP, with services ranging from strategy, design, user experience, and development. Additionally, MERGE managed hosting, ensured security, and maintained the environment's performance
When Speed Meets Precision: Launching Time-Sensitive Digital Solutions
When brands are met with urgent, time-sensitive demands, component-driven design systems provide high-quality and reliable solutions, enabling teams to launch fully functional sites in as little as 72 hours. This was the case for Baptist Health in 2020, as they needed a COVID information hub to guide users with critical updates and resources.
The Baptist Health Marketing team rapidly developed the information architecture and content, while MERGE leveraged Sitecore’s design system to configure a microsite. Through close collaboration and efficient use of the approved design system, the fully functional site was launched in just 72 hours, delivering timely and essential information to the community.
Not only does this speak to the power of component-driven design systems in meeting urgent demands, but it also highlights the impact of seamless collaboration and rapid execution in delivering critical, high-quality solutions.
Driving Innovation With Component-Driven Design Systems
Component-driven design systems empower brands to create scalable, efficient, and consistent digital experiences. By streamlining workflows and facilitating collaboration, these systems position organizations for sustained success in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Does your brand need help bringing a component-driven design system to life? Learn how MERGE can help.
