The expectations for enterprise applications are sky-high, and the pressure to keep up with design trends can lead companies to overspend on acquiring new talent or web tools.
Organizations expect features that not only improve ROI but also provide an outstanding user experience. Things like: smooth functioning, catering to the ever-changing requirements of the company, integrating multiple sub-systems or third-party systems, and above all, security. All of this can be covered under one umbrella, the design system.
This rapidly expanding market calls for a design system that addresses patterns from the fundamental level. Industry experts recommend applying reusable components through modular concepts to your dynamic design ecosystem made of large and slow-moving applications. Atomic Design factors in device consistency, AI, intricate data visualization patterns, and conversational interfaces while maximizing benefits.
Business leaders can now embrace cost-savings, ease of maintenance, and increased development speed through component-based, nimble design.
Atomic Design – The game-changer
Atomic Design, a methodology created by Brad Frost in 2013, is based on the idea that a series of coexisting building blocks define a design system.
Atomic Design pairs software development with the laws of chemistry to build easily modifiable user interfaces. The best part of Atomic Design is that it allows UI/UX designers to understand what they are creating, thus simplifying the interface design and development processes.
Diving Deeper into Atomic Design
It starts with modular design components called Atoms. They are the primary visual building blocks of the atomic structure and can be combined to form Molecules. It follows the component hierarchy (shown below) to the fully-functional components of a website or Pages.
All the components are categorized based on complexity as defined with examples below.
Enterprise Challenges Addressed by Atomic Design
1. Business associates may work on up to five heterogeneous enterprise applications every day while bouncing between different systems.
These may include diverse designs, interfaces, interaction patterns that lead to higher learning curves, more development time, quality compromise, slower speed-to-market, more errors, more rework, and higher costs in return.
2. Inconsistencies in static design mock-ups due to different internal departments’ involvement or changing brand guidelines lead to longer feedback cycles and duplication of efforts. This can spike up your operating expenses.
3. Frequent maintenance activities for large and clunky codebases make up about 70% of businesses’ operating costs.
4. Lack of component reusability needs more testing for accessibility, browser support, device support, and progressive enhancement. More testing efforts/re-coding means more working capital expenses.
5. Strong documentation becomes difficult for complex heterogeneous components that increase the learning curve for new developers and designers.
Benefits of Atomic Design
Here are six reasons why more businesses want to take the Atomic Design route to successful UX implementation.
1. Allows new resources to get to work quickly
We have seen this first-hand at Radiant Digital. Atomic design helps designers work faster by pulling up the existing components from the pattern library (reusability). They don’t have to start designing from scratch. This significant curbs development/testing time, errors, maintenance efforts, UI inconsistencies, and, eventually, project costs.
2. Quicker Prototyping
We have seen our design cycles go from 5-10 days to 1-3 days because designers have to pick and combine the required elements from the library. This eliminates decision fatigue and allows our designers to focus on solutions, not the components.
3. Easy Updates and Maintenance
A centralized design library ensures that if an organization’s brand guidelines change, only one primary component attribute needs to be updated. The change can then be pushed to all other instances across the site. Similarly, unwanted components can be removed instantly. This saves the significant time spent on the retroactive update of websites, one component at a time.
4. More Consistent Code
Code duplication can be alleviated since designers can capitalize on predefined atoms to create an interface design. Atomic design principles help developers work from the same library while driving consistency in applications, development, and UI.
5. Creating a Style Guide is simplified
The atomic design creates atoms and molecules even before a site is built. This can serve as a basic style guide for existing and upcoming web applications. Tools like Invision and Zeplin help extrapolate these components and allow stakeholders, designers, and developers to simplify page construction.
6. Diminished Development Lifecycles
Developers create application layouts faster when they can reuse existing atoms, molecules, and organisms. This reduces the strain and speeds up the creation of a cleaner and leaner application.
By developing reusable components, our development time has gone from weeks to days at Radiant Digital.
Atomic Design & ROI
Companies that do not realize the importance of well-designed products are being surpassed by competitors. Atomic design can leverage your UX for a positive ROI impact.
Atomic Design – The Differentiator between Good UX and Bad UX Design
Customers are more likely to buy a product that delivers a good UX design.
Today’s most successful E-commerce sites experience improved sales because of compact designs that expedite response times or page load times.
Want similar results for your business? Contact us to create UX design innovation with Atomic Design.
Wrapping up
With Atomic design principles, you can vastly improve consistency, increase control over branding globally, and boost greater efficiency in design and development teams for better employee satisfaction. Also, companies will spend more time focusing on the customer and delivering high-quality products as a result.
At Radiant Digital, we have a wealth of experience in implementing Atomic design to design systems for companies of all sizes. We’re here to help you create impressive designs efficiently. Call our experts for a no-cost, no-commitment demo today!
