Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

> As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product. Huzzah! we thought. We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product. Chefs kiss.

This article has nothing to do with bleeding-edge tech. It's about launching a product around which zero validation work has been done.

The quote above is the entire description of the alleged "bleeding-edge tech." I still don't know what the problem is. "Design system" is vague enough to me at least to be meaningless. There's a screenshot that looks like web analytics.

Web analytics have been done to death. This isn't bleeding-edge tech. It's me-too products desperately fighting for market share by going ever deeper. Big difference.

You've got to be an excellent communicator to play this game. Given the mismatched title and fluff in the article, I can see why the team had a hard time connecting with prospective customers.

The entirety of this article (and their startup's failure) can be summed up by this one line:

> prospects didn't know [...] the problem we were solving

If "prospects" don't know what problem you're solving, 99% of the time that means they don't have the problem your product solves. And if that's true, they're not actually a prospect. Seems like a classic case of being a solution looking for a problem.

Also the author's nonsensical "circle of death" reminds me of the "Conjoined Triangles of Success" from Silicon Valley[1]. Except Silicon Valley is a parody, and I don't think this article is meant to be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB7dInljmO4

I think the relevant phrase here is a "solution in search of a problem". I understand exactly what their product was intended to do and have worked on a lot of design system projects before, but adoption rate has never really been a key metric of anything.

A design system is a systematic approach to achieving consistent look-and-feel across the product(s) of a company.

This is in contrast to the "non-systematic" approach, which is to have designers use apps like Photoshop to copy-paste design elements and then have developers eye-ball and eye-drop that into code. You may up with lots of redundant definitions for essentially the same visual intent, especially with larger teams.

Most products start out with the non-systematic approach and then may later attempt a switch to a design system. Presumably, this is where this product could help you validate your progress. Whether integration of such a product is a valuable addition to your workflow or a distraction is up for debate.

It would certainly be useful, but I wouldn’t be very inclined to pay for it. It’s just not that useful.

You also need adoption across all the teams in your org to reap most of the benefits.

Design System is a term of art for UX Designers.

My wife is the UX Designer in the family, so I can't say more than that, though

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