An interactive business case for design systems

Design systems have objectively proven their value well past the point of debate.

Notable value-adds include faster onboarding, easier design/dev workflows, better product consistency and improved accessibility.

But efficiency is far and away the standout value of design systems. A healthy design system reaps incredible returns on efficiency alone.

“Using a design system made a simple form page 47% faster to develop versus coding it from scratch.” —Sparkbox blog

“We found that when participants had access to a design system they completed their objective 34% faster than without a design system.” — Figma blog

“When accessing [Cycle Time] in projects with our clients, we’ve found a Goldilocks zone between 20 - 40% greater cycle capacity.” — Knapsack blog

A design system team of 5 supporting 200 consumers would need to improve efficiency by ~2% to break even.

Break even is the percentage of the design system compared to its consumers. Assuming everyone works the same amount of hours, improving consumer efficiency by the calculated percentage will offset the design system team.

At a 30% efficiency gain, 200 consumers perform closer to 260. That would be a net gain of 55 consumers, or a 11x return on investment.

Gained workers the product of total consumers and efficiency, subtracted by the size of the design system team.

Based on a mean salary of $150,000, a net gain of 55 consumers would equate to $8M in annual savings.

Annuals savings is the product of gained consumers and mean salary.

If the company’s revenue per employee is $500,000, those additional 55 consumers results in an increase of $27M in annual revenue.

Annual revenue is the product of gained consumers and annual revenue per employee.

Based on efficiency alone, this outlined scenario provides $35M in annual net value.

Annual net value is the sum of annual savings and annual revenue.

Now send this to your boss so you can get the funding so you can get to work.

https://pjonori.com/design-systems-business-case/

Questions? pj@pjonori.com