Design Systems: Pilots & Scorecards

Dan Mall shares techniques for selecting pilot projects to develop and prove out design decisions for large-scale design systems:

There���s a sweet spot for great pilot candidates after
planning for the pilot has begun but before it gets
designed or built. If a product isn���t far enough along
in planning, we likely don���t know enough about it to
say whether it���ll make for a good pilot or not. But
if it���s already in the process of being created or
recreated 1 , it���s probably too far along to be able
to integrate parts���read: component design, patterns,
and/or working code���from the design system without
some amount of refactor, which teams in need of a design
system often can���t afford.

Once we find some good potential candidates in that
sweet spot, there���s a set of criteria we use to determine
a pilot���s potential efficacy.

Dan offers up practical foundational metrics for comparing project candidates, and you can of course supplement them with your own.

Dan, Brad, and I have begun to use this scorecard approach in our latest large-scale design-system project. Giving project candidates a hard score makes them easier to discuss inside a large organization. Scorecards like this are portable and provide apples-to-apples comparisons for projects that are often very different in substance or complexity.

Dan Mall | Design Systems: Pilots & Scorecards