Strengthen your digital employee experience with a design system

A design system is a guide of design principles, templates, design language and other digital components that ensure you keep your organisation's "digital red thread" when working on websites, intranets or creating other digital experiences.

Why a design system?

Let's start from the ground up and answer the question "Why a design system?". The short answer is: quality, scalability and efficiency.

Quality

With a fixed framework, you don't have to reinvent the wheel again and again, but can start from already quality-assured templates and components. You also own your design system, so you are less dependent on your web agency. This can be a reassurance for the smaller client.

Scalability

Reuse your sketches, templates and components in more places than just the web. Maybe you want to use it in its entirety, or maybe you just choose parts of it – like buttons or image types on a promotional website or mobile app. Working with one or more web agencies also makes you a clearer and better client.

Efficiency

The more quality-assured material you can reuse, the more time and money you'll save. We've already established that you'll be a better client. And the testing phase becomes much easier – you reduce friction in your work and save resources during each production run.

The importance of the design system for the digital employee experience

First and foremost, it's important to look at the digital employee experience from a holistic perspective. It's about the employee's overall experience of their role with the employer. How is the whole experience connected and why?

Just like an omni-channel strategy for the customer journey, an end-to-end design strategy for the digital workplace can create harmony for the employee in their daily work. Bouncing between different UX experiences in our daily work creates irritation, disruption and reduces clarity, which in turn makes us less effective. It also negatively affects the image of the workplace.

Instead, putting some effort into a design system and creating a consistent experience across the web, social media, corporate brand and the office has a big impact on the employee experience – something that is becoming increasingly important as younger people choose employers.

This is in line with companies investing more and more money in technology for wellbeing, engagement and culture in our organisations. Throughout history, we've had company policies that tell us how to behave towards each other, how to behave towards customers and what our employer's obligations are – so why not include the digital perspective in the policy?

Stitching together a consistent digital experience will make your employees more engaged and effective while making you a more attractive employer.