Find Out If Your Design System Is Better Than Nothing
summary
Claim: measure design-system adoption by tracking the source mix — proportion of design-system imports versus homebrew components — over time. Uses static code analysis on real repos (Grafana example: ~7,000 design-system usages, 290 plugins, ~11,000 combined usages) and an open-source tool called radius tracker. Shows that displacement up is good down is bad, that adoption plateaus when coverage limits are reached, and that the automated metric successfully isolates preference from mere project growth.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 0:32Design system is worthless if not used
- 3:03Competition
- 3:46What is a homebrew component?
- 9:22Is your Design System better than nothing?
- 10:31What is an appropriate sideways level?
- 11:58Usage share is about the entire team, not just developers
- 13:12Formal grammar
- 14:17Homebrew syntax
- 15:40What is a usage?
- 17:40Usage in code is a human concept. It is fuzzy and needs to be defined
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