The cost of bad design

Have you ever heard this quote before? It’s easy to agree with – but as it turns out, bad design practices are actually very difficult to see all at once. It reveals itself in small ways at first, as a few extra days to find assets, different variations of ‘special’ buttons. Eventually culminates, at best, in inconsistent designs across pages and products, and at worst, very confused users that will ultimately hurt your bottom line.  

At UNRVLD, we’ve found that one of the simplest ways to develop harmony across competing ideas and priorities in your delivery team is to organise with Atomic Design and have a consistent Design Language.  

Now I know what you’re thinking, having unified lexicons to draw from, all held in an ‘Atomic Design System’ sounds like a lot of effort, and expensive. This is where I’d normally draw your attention to our headline quote, but today I won’t. Today I’ll simply point out that it doesn't need to be difficult or even costly long-term:

For component driven platforms such as Optimizely, it can empower both designers and developers to act together at speed (saving a lot of time in the long term). Together, they create designs and variations (almost) as fast as you can imagine them.

The cost of long-term consistency of your brand and digital ecosystem could be managed and maintained from single source of well designed ‘Truth’.

With the right strategy and powerful A/B testing tools like those on Optimizely, your marketing and experience teams will be able to test the ROI on design changes by using well organised easily updatable Atomic Design variants.

If you’re not convinced of the power an Atomic Design System can have on your organisation yet, that’s ok… I’ll leave you with this final thought; What would the world look like if your strategy and time-to-market took weeks, not months? What if it took days, not weeks to see your ROI?