Being able to deliver a great customer experience is imperative (as any business owner would tell you). Creating an experience leaves a long-lasting impression and will ensure customers keep on doing business with you in the future, explains Elise Balsillie, Head of Thryv Australia.

As a way to make customer experiences shine, each customer experience should be consistent from whichever interaction and on which platform they have connected with your business. One way to deliver consistency is to start with a documented design system.

Essentially, a design system provides consistent direction for any element you want to look and behave in a standard way. For smaller businesses, a design system may simply contain your logo, colours, fonts, and maybe even direction for content voice and tone. It’s a common playbook that can save time and money when working with writers or graphic designers.

For organisations like franchises, it helps ensure the same styles and approaches are used for websites, eCommerce, billing, marketing and more. It can also provide pre-built, pre-approved digital components and widgets for easy plug-and-play.

Having a shared design system will save you the time and money that you may have spent reinventing digital solutions. Using this customer experience playbook also makes developing and testing digital work go much faster.

If you want to evolve your website into a digital hub where customers can schedule appointments or pay bills, your design system tells software developers how that experience should look and work.

WATCH: 2023 top design trends explained

Benefits of a design system in your business

A design system can include:

• Branding assets — logos, colour palette, text styles and icons.
• Design standards and principles — how to use the branding assets when building any client experience, online or offline.
• Components — reusable ‘building blocks’ that make up your web pages and software interfaces.
• Development documentation — how to use the components and design standards to create a finished product.

The benefits of building and using a design system are rewarding. Providing a uniform customer experience builds familiarity, a sense of reliability and, ultimately, loyalty.

But beyond that, it also has four key advantages.

1. Consistency

Delivering consistent experiences — offline and online — is critical to keeping your customers engaged. A documented design system helps ensure multiple designers in multiple geographies, working on multiple products, approach your designs the same way.

2. Efficiency

Efficiency is the natural next outcome. It happens when the people implementing software can answer common questions for themselves without bothering the designers.

In documenting how and why designs are to be implemented, designers should include information about the people they’re designing for, any results from road-testing their designs, and their overall intentions. That information helps developers further downstream (usually disconnected) from the designer’s build experiences, supporting the desired approach more efficiently.

3. Speed

A documented design system can save small businesses hours and even days on repetitive tasks. Using a design system significantly reduces design and coding times, meaning products launch sooner and customers can enjoy them sooner.

4. Cost

Each of the above also contributes in a big way to the ultimate measurement — cost savings. Consistency, efficiency and speed all translate into time and money saved. Particularly for small businesses (where you’ve likely outsourced development and/or design), having clear design guidance means you don’t have to keep dipping into your contracting budget for additional direction.

Customers won’t be the only ones who benefit from a design system – your business will profit as well, so in the end, everyone wins.

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https://www.kochiesbusinessbuilders.com.au/how-to-create-a-strong-design-brief-for-a-logo-that-gets-results/