About

Infra UX Design System

The INFRA 360 Design System is a comprehensive set of design guidelines, components, and resources that provides a unified framework for designing and developing the next generation of products within the INFRA BU ecosystem.

INFRA 360 DS is designed to help our product teams create high-quality products that meet the needs of our users while also ensuring a consistent brand experience across all of our products.

What is a Design System?

Design Systems form a comprehensive set of values, semantics, syntax, and context that form the foundation of a shared design language for the entire team. The most recognizable feature of a design system is usually a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications. The system serves as an internal collaboration tool used by both designers and engineers, and includes a system’s rules and principles, the visual design elements, and the code that renders the UI. The end-users are the people that actually use our products.

A design system is a living, funded internal product with a roadmap & backlog, serving an ecosystem. It is not merely a collection of the assets and components you use to build a digital product. Rather, it is the culmination of several individual artifacts, which can include any or all of the following (and more):

Component Library / Charting library (where the code lives)
Code usage guidelines and docs
Accessibility guidelines
Style guide or visual pattern library
Design tooling (e.g. Figma Library)
Design usage documentation
Voice and tone guidelines
Brand guidelines

Some of these artifacts document and govern your design language, while others embody it. Combined together with an overall workflow, they form a design system.

Why a Design System?

Too few constraints

Software design has few physical constraints compared to many other design disciplines. This allows for a variety of solutions to any given challenge but also opens it to disjointed user experiences. As UX designers, we must create and follow our own constraints.

Multiple designers and stakeholders

Software is often built by teams– sometimes incredibly large teams– of people. The challenge to create coherent experiences multiplies exponentially as more people are added to the mix. Also, over time, no matter how consistent or small a team is, different people will contribute new solutions and styles, causing experiences to diverge.

Multitude of platforms

We need to ship our product on a multitude of platforms and devices. Keeping features and designs synchronized takes significant effort, often requiring the same work to be repeated across all of these platforms.

Software as a continuum

Another unique thing about software is that, while it can be considered a product, it doesn’t really wear out and get replaced like traditional consumer products. Code and designs created years ago still exist in many places, even after the landscape of a company and its product have shifted significantly. This requires constant maintenance and upgrading.