Yes, Design Systems Do Improve Developer Efficiency and Design Consistency

The most difficult thing about promoting a design system is to convince leadership of its value. Leaders often ask you to prove their value. Why should we pay attention to good front-end development and consistency? They might say, “Of course, everyone wants a cool design system, but is it worth it?”

This question is difficult to answer because developer productivity, front-end quality, and even accessibility to some extent are all difficult to quantify. In contrast, Google's core web metrics (Core Web Vitals) are very smart, giving the problem numerical values ​​and providing practical next steps.

For design systems, we don't have metrics that we can measure, and we can't just say, "Yes, we need to form a design system team to improve our design system score from a bad 60/100." That would be great if we had such metrics, but I don't think we'll ever have it.

Sparkbox attempts to solve this problem. They used a small test to measure how fast the development speed of eight developers has improved. They asked developers to make a form by hand and then again use the IBM Carbon design system they had never used before to make the same form.

The results are very interesting:

Making simple form pages using a design system is 47% faster than coding from scratch. The median time for commits from zero was 4.2 hours, while the median time for commits using Carbon was 2 hours. Carbon's time includes the time it takes for developers to familiarize themselves with designing systems.

Now imagine if these developers were already familiar with the Carbon design system! If so, I think it will take a lot faster to build these forms than the initial results.

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