In a time where it’s vital to stay ahead of your game in a sea of competitors, it’s absolutely key that brands and MarTech vendors move fast and adapt to the changing market, while still operating on the basis of their unique selling propositions.
Paving the way as a global vendor of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions, we questioned and discussed whether tech vendors could ‘… afford not to invest in users’ in our previous blogpost. We elaborated on how we continuously listen and learn from our own users across many different industries. When building new features, we collaborate with the people who know and use our DAM products each day to create the most valuable and intuitive solutions. UX (user experience) isn’t the frosting, but is naturally part of every, single layer of the cake. Some would ask ‘How do we support rapid time-to-market for new features without making the users suffer from inconsistent experiences’?
Our answer is simply; a design system.
A design system is a framework that documents principles and philosophies for the user experience and product design, naming convention and rules for the look and feel, alongside implementation guides for reusable components. It’s used as a single source of truth for products and experiences to stay consistent, even at scale.
Macro perspectives and micro details
Brad Frost, the creator of patternlab.io and author of Atomic Design, has developed a methodology for deconstructing user interfaces into atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages. By combining atoms such as checkboxes, labels, icons, and buttons, we can group elements into molecules and organisms to work as reusable components, as illustrated below.
As design systems constantly evolve in parallel with our mission to innovate and stay ahead, we use a modular and component-based system like this to create, prototype, improve and combine features. This allows us to avoid compromising the underlying design and service principles for customer centricity and user involvement.
Transparency and collaboration shape our DAM solutions
We strongly believe that design systems should not merely be seen as a static inventory of design tokens. We treat our design system as a dynamic product, which requires organized management.
Based on a centralized model, our design team manages requests for content and guides. We investigate the impact of new components and patterns and run the daily maintenance of the system in close dialogue with the QA team and developers.
To streamline this process, we’ve integrated our primary product design tool (Adobe XD) directly into our task and project management tool, Jira, using the ‘Adobe XD for Jira‘ plugin. This helps ease our daily communication and task management with the rest of Digizuite’s Product Team. The integration provides us with a shared entrance point for inspection-powered design documentation, naming conventions and principles – available at everyone’s fingertips when collaborating on feature development in our Digital Asset Management solutions.
In other words; a well-supported design system is a shared language that not only improves the efficiency of quality assurance and communication across Research & Development professions, but also enables us to spend time on value-adding activities. Such as engaging with and learning from our users.
“I can see exactly how the design is going to be. No more guessing.”
– Stefan Fodor, External Consultant Developer
A guide for developing Digital Asset Management solutions enables us to:
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Ensure a consistent user experience across Digizuite’s products and services
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Speed up time-to-market for new releases
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Improve the internal onboarding process in our Product Team
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Collaborate efficiently with external partners
Based on the mantra that ’value is created through collaboration and transparency’, we focus on creating the best possible methodologies and tools for every aspect of our users’ direct or indirect touchpoints.
Next Up
Stay tuned for our next blogpost about how we transform business needs to product experiences.
For further reading and inspiration on design systems, please visit:
Curious to see our DAM system in action?
Please reach out to use to get a live online demo.
