Design systems need regular updates to stay effective. Without proper care, they can become outdated, leading to slower delivery, inconsistent products, and increased UX debt. Here’s a quick guide to maintaining your design system:
- Ownership: Assign a dedicated product owner and core team to manage the system, prioritize requests, and ensure alignment across teams.
- Audits: Regularly review design tokens, components, and documentation for consistency with the live product.
- Accessibility: Test components for compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards and fix any issues promptly.
- Versioning: Use semantic versioning to manage updates and provide clear migration guides for breaking changes.
- Automation: Integrate CI pipelines to automate testing, documentation updates, and deprecation workflows.
- Documentation: Keep all guidelines accurate and up-to-date to maintain trust and usability.
- Maintenance Routine: Schedule regular sessions to review analytics, prioritize updates, and address feedback.
How To Maintain a Design System – Best Practices for UI Designers – Amy Hupe – Design System Talk
Governance and Ownership Checklist
Without clear ownership, design systems can lose direction. When questions go unanswered and decisions stall, teams often resort to creating their own disconnected solutions. Governance helps establish who makes decisions, how changes are approved, and when updates are implemented.
Treating your design system like a product – complete with a roadmap, backlog, and measurable goals – ensures it stays aligned with your organization’s strategy. Interestingly, many design systems fail not because of poor components but due to neglected governance. Experts even suggest that this lack of ownership poses the greatest threat to a design system’s survival.
Define System Ownership
The first step is to appoint a design system product owner with clear authority and accountability. This individual manages the roadmap, prioritizes incoming requests, and ensures alignment across stakeholders. Supporting this role is a core team that typically includes a design lead (focused on visual language, interaction patterns, and accessibility), an engineering lead (responsible for component architecture, code quality, and release management), and sometimes a content strategist or accessibility specialist.
To keep roles clear, document responsibilities using a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). For instance, the design lead might handle reviewing new patterns, while the product owner makes final decisions on scope, consulting product managers to ensure alignment with broader goals.
Organizations with dedicated design system teams – usually between two and ten members in mid-to-large companies – report higher adoption rates and greater satisfaction compared to systems managed as side projects. Make your team’s roles and contact details easily accessible in your documentation so others know exactly who to reach out to with questions.
Tools like UXPin can be instrumental in supporting this ownership model. By hosting shared, code-backed component libraries, UXPin acts as a single source of truth. This synchronization between design assets and front-end code helps the core team maintain consistency and showcase how patterns perform across different states and breakpoints.
Once ownership is established, the next step is creating a structured process for contributions and reviews.
Set Up Contribution and Review Workflow
A well-organized contribution process prevents the team from being overwhelmed by random requests. Start with a single intake channel – like a form or ticket queue – where contributors can submit proposals. Each submission should include key details: a summary, use case, priority, target product area, and deadlines.
Clearly differentiate between what qualifies as a design system addition versus a product-specific pattern. Contribution guidelines should outline the required evidence, such as the user problem, constraints, usage examples, and metrics. Specify the expected level of fidelity – wireframes, prototypes, or code snippets – and documentation standards, including naming conventions, responsive behavior, and accessibility considerations.
Establish transparent review stages like "submitted", "under review", "needs more information", "approved for design", "approved for development", "scheduled for release", and "declined." Each stage should detail what happens next.
Document decision-making rules. For example, the design system product owner might have the final say on scope, the design lead on pattern decisions, and the engineering lead on technical feasibility. Set clear service-level expectations, such as response times for each review stage, so contributors know when to expect feedback.
Hold regular triage sessions to classify and prioritize requests. Categories might include "bug", "enhancement", "new pattern", or "out of scope." Assign owners and update status labels in a way that’s visible to everyone. This transparency reduces ad-hoc requests via Slack or email and manages expectations.
Maintain Operating Cadence
Once roles and workflows are defined, keep the system running smoothly with a regular operating rhythm.
High-performing teams use recurring rituals to ensure predictable maintenance. These might include weekly triage sessions, biweekly design and engineering reviews, monthly roadmap or backlog refinements, and quarterly strategy discussions.
Each meeting should have a clear agenda and be time-boxed. Align these sessions with product sprint schedules and consider U.S.-friendly time zones for distributed teams.
Document decisions from these meetings in shared resources like roadmap boards, backlogs, and change logs. This reduces reliance on institutional memory and builds trust. Teams that integrate governance into existing agile ceremonies – using shared backlogs, sprint rituals, and DevOps practices – find it easier to manage design system tasks alongside product development.
Set up transparent communication channels, such as a public changelog and release notes for every version, a central documentation hub with governance policies and contribution guides, and an open Slack or Teams channel for quick clarifications. This hub should detail roles, workflows, decision-making rules, meeting schedules, and links to roadmaps and release notes.
Define access and permission rules in your design tools and code repositories. Limit editing rights for core libraries to maintainers but allow broad read-only access to encourage adoption. Use branching and pull request templates in repositories to enforce reviews and prevent unintended changes.
Platforms like UXPin can further streamline this process by centralizing coded components, ensuring alignment between design and production. By connecting design libraries directly to production code, UXPin minimizes discrepancies and shifts governance discussions toward API contracts, versioning, and release management, rather than file organization.
Design Assets and Documentation Checklist
To maintain consistency between design and production, design assets and documentation must align with the current codebase. When they fall out of sync, trust in the system erodes, and teams often resort to creating their own, unsanctioned workarounds. In fact, surveys reveal that over half of design system practitioners identify "keeping documentation up to date" as a major challenge, often ranking it as a bigger problem than visual inconsistencies.
To address this, it’s essential to treat design assets and documentation as dynamic elements that evolve alongside code. This involves implementing regular audits, clear validation criteria, and automated workflows to minimize manual updates. These practices ensure alignment between UI assets, component libraries, and production code.
Audit UI Libraries and Tokens
Design tokens – named values for elements like colors, typography, spacing, elevation, and motion – act as the bridge between design tools and code. Any misalignment here can lead to inconsistencies across products.
Plan quarterly audits where designers and developers collaboratively review tokens against the live product and code library. Export the token list from your design tool and compare it to the codebase using a spreadsheet or script. Flag mismatches, deprecated items, or duplicates for review.
During these audits, evaluate tokens based on three key criteria:
- Actual usage: Are tokens actively used in live products or just in experiments?
- Standards compliance: Do they meet brand guidelines and accessibility standards, such as color contrast ratios?
- Redundancy: Are there tokens with nearly identical values that can be consolidated?
For example, if the design tool includes numerous shades of gray but the codebase uses only six, reduce the design set to match the code and provide clear migration instructions for affected components.
Categorize tokens as "active", "deprecated", or "experimental." Deprecated tokens should either be removed or clearly marked to avoid accidental reuse. Similarly, review icons for consistency in stroke, corner radius, perspective, and color usage. Ensure export sizes, file formats (e.g., SVG for web, PNG for mobile), and naming conventions are standardized. Identify and consolidate redundant icons to maintain a streamlined library.
Organize icons into clear categories (e.g., navigation, actions, status, feedback) with usage notes to guide teams in selecting the right asset. This structure minimizes style drift and ensures quick, accurate asset selection over time.
Tools like UXPin can help synchronize design and code automatically. As Brian Demchak, Sr. UX Designer at AAA Digital & Creative Services, explains:
"We have fully integrated our custom-built React Design System and can design with our coded components. It has increased our productivity, quality, and consistency, streamlining our testing of layouts and the developer handoff process".
Validate Component Libraries
Once tokens and UI assets are aligned, ensure that component libraries adhere to the same standards. Each component should have a single, verified implementation that serves as the source of truth.
Check that every component is consistent in structure, behavior, and documentation across both design tools and the codebase. Avoid duplicate versions with different names or slight variations, as these create confusion. Map each design component to its corresponding code implementation with clear references, such as Storybook links or repository paths, to simplify verification and identify gaps.
For each component, confirm that the documentation includes all necessary states and variants, such as hover, focus, active, error, disabled, loading, and responsive behaviors across breakpoints. Missing states often lead to implementation errors. For example, a button component should showcase all its states, not just the default one.
Usage guidelines should address:
- What problem does this solve?
- When should it be used or avoided?
- How does it behave?
Include configuration details (e.g., props, attributes, variants) and interaction behavior (e.g., keyboard navigation, focus management). Annotated screenshots or interactive prototypes can demonstrate proper usage in real-world contexts, reducing ambiguity.
Document common anti-patterns to help teams avoid misuse. For instance, "don’t use this button for navigation" or "avoid nesting this component within another of the same type." These guidelines empower teams to make informed decisions in complex workflows.
Accessibility requirements should be clearly outlined in a dedicated section. Focus on actionable items like contrast ratios, minimum touch targets (44×44 pixels for mobile), focus states, keyboard navigation, ARIA attributes, and labeling. For modals, include specifics such as trapping focus within the modal, providing a visible close button, ensuring keyboard navigation, and restoring focus to the trigger element upon closure. This approach keeps the documentation concise and actionable.
Keep Documentation Current
Outdated documentation erodes trust. When teams can’t rely on it, they default to tribal knowledge, which defeats the purpose of a design system.
Adopt a versioned documentation model where every change to a component or token triggers a corresponding update in the documentation. Include a "Last updated" timestamp in US date format (e.g., "Last updated: 04/15/2025") and a brief summary or link to a changelog. Enforce this process through code review checklists or CI checks that block builds if breaking changes lack documentation updates.
Assign a team or individual to ensure documentation stays synchronized with releases. This accountability ensures that API and interaction updates are always reflected in the documentation. Some teams include documentation reviews as part of their sprint ceremonies, treating updates as acceptance criteria for completing component work.
Living documentation sites – generated from component code comments or MDX files – can stay more aligned with the codebase than static style guides. These sites can automatically pull prop tables, code examples, and usage notes, reducing the need for manual updates.
Centralize all references in an internal portal or design system site with search and tagging by product area or platform. This makes it easier for teams to find what they need and discourages the creation of unsanctioned libraries.
Platforms like UXPin, which support interactive, code-backed components from React libraries, allow designers to prototype using the same components developers ship. Documentation pages can include links to UXPin examples, code repositories, and usage guidelines, creating a connected ecosystem where updates flow seamlessly.
"When I used UXPin Merge, our engineering time was reduced by around 50%. Imagine how much money that saves across an enterprise-level organization with dozens of designers and hundreds of engineers".
To help teams implement these practices, here are some actionable checklists:
- UI Library Audit Checklist: Verify naming conventions match the code, remove deprecated components, map each component to its code reference, confirm all states and variants are documented, and ensure responsive behavior is included.
- Token Review Checklist: Categorize tokens by type (color, typography, spacing, etc.), mark tokens as active, deprecated, or experimental, verify contrast ratios and brand compliance, consolidate duplicates, and document migration paths for deprecated tokens.
- Documentation Update Checklist: Ensure API and prop tables match the current code, refresh screenshots and examples, include US-style timestamps (MM/DD/YYYY), log changes in the changelog, and verify all links to repositories and prototypes.
Providing these checklists as downloadable templates – whether as spreadsheets or task lists – can help teams quickly adopt these practices and reduce the effort of starting from scratch.
Technical Implementation and Versioning Checklist
A strong technical foundation is essential for keeping updates and integrations smooth. When backed by consistent design assets and clear governance, this foundation allows teams to make updates confidently without risking production stability. However, without clear versioning rules, reliable distribution channels, and automated quality checks, even the best-designed components can become problematic. Engineering teams rely on predictable release cycles, transparent handling of breaking changes, and workflows that fit their current toolchains – whether they use monorepos, polyrepos, or legacy codebases.
The goal is simple: maintain a stable, high-quality codebase that integrates seamlessly with product repositories. This stability helps reduce maintenance costs, speeds up feature delivery, and minimizes production issues. In the U.S., engineering organizations often expect design systems to meet the same standards as other shared libraries, complete with CI/CD pipelines, pull request workflows, and alignment with sprint schedules.
Versioning Strategy and Backward Compatibility
Semantic versioning (major.minor.patch) serves as a clear way to communicate changes: major for breaking updates, minor for new features, and patch for fixes.
To enforce these rules, integrate automated checks into your CI pipeline. For example, if a pull request removes a component prop or changes its default behavior, the system should flag it as a breaking change. This ensures that such changes don’t slip through during code reviews.
Align release cycles with product sprint schedules. For instance, if teams follow two-week sprints, consider biweekly minor updates and monthly or quarterly major updates. This predictability allows teams to plan upgrades during sprint planning rather than rushing to fix broken builds mid-sprint.
Maintain a changelog for every release, categorizing changes into breaking updates, new features, bug fixes, and deprecations. Use git tags to mark releases and publish the changelog in your documentation. Each entry should include the version number, the release date (e.g., 03/15/2025), and a summary of changes. For breaking changes, provide direct links to migration guides.
Establish a deprecation policy that gives teams enough time to adapt. For instance, if a component is deprecated in version 2.3.0, maintain it through versions 2.4.0 and 2.5.0 before removing it in version 3.0.0. Communicate this timeline clearly in documentation, console warnings, and release notes, ensuring teams have at least one or two release cycles to plan migrations.
Provide migration guides with clear, side-by-side code examples. For instance, if a button’s variant="primary" prop is renamed to variant="solid", the guide should show both the old and new implementations:
Before (v2.x):
<Button variant="primary">Click me</Button> After (v3.0):
<Button variant="solid">Click me</Button> These guides should cater to both designers and engineers. Designers need to know which assets or components to update, while engineers benefit from detailed code snippets and prop mappings. To make migrations easier, consider offering codemods – scripts that automatically update codebases.
Publish deprecation policies in your documentation and use lint rules to flag deprecated components during development. This proactive approach minimizes friction when adopting new APIs and reduces unexpected breakages.
Integration and Distribution
Product teams need reliable ways to install and update the design system. A common practice is publishing the system as a versioned npm package, either public or private, allowing teams to install it with a simple command like npm install @yourcompany/design-system and upgrade using standard package manager workflows.
Define peer dependencies (e.g., React) to give teams control over library versions and avoid conflicts. For instance, if the design system requires React 17 or higher, specify it as a peer dependency rather than bundling React directly. This keeps bundle sizes manageable.
For monorepos, use workspaces (via npm, Yarn, or pnpm) to share the design system across multiple packages. This setup simplifies dependency management and enables local testing before publishing. In this scenario, the design system might live in a shared workspace (e.g., packages/design-system), allowing product apps to import it directly.
Provide clear installation and import instructions in your documentation, including examples for environments like Create React App, Next.js, and Vite. Add troubleshooting tips for common issues. For example, if teams need to configure a bundler plugin to handle SVG imports, include precise configuration snippets.
By integrating design and development through code-backed components, teams work from the same verified source. Tools like UXPin’s code-backed React components allow teams to sync a Git repository directly into the design tool. This ensures that updates to the design system automatically reflect in both production codebases and design prototypes, eliminating manual syncing and reducing drift.
Testing and Quality Gates
Automated testing is critical for catching regressions before they affect product teams. Set up a baseline test matrix that runs on every pull request and blocks merges until all checks pass. This matrix should include:
- Unit Tests: Validate component logic, such as ensuring a button’s
onClickcallback works or that disabled buttons don’t respond. - Visual Regression Tests: Use tools like Percy, Chromatic, or Playwright to compare screenshots and catch unintended UI changes (e.g., a button’s padding shifting from 12px to 16px).
- Accessibility Checks: Run audits with tools like axe-core or Lighthouse to flag issues like missing ARIA labels or insufficient color contrast. Configure your CI pipeline to fail builds if accessibility violations are detected, ensuring compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
Wire these tests into your pull request workflow using GitHub branch protection rules or similar tools. No pull request should be merged unless all tests pass.
Track metrics like code coverage and bundle size changes. For example, flag pull requests if code coverage drops below 80% or if a change increases the package size by more than 10 KB.
Platforms like UXPin allow teams to validate interactions, accessibility, and responsiveness earlier in the development process by prototyping with code-backed components. This approach reduces rework and helps teams catch issues before committing code. As Larry Sawyer, Lead UX Designer, explains:
"When I used UXPin Merge, our engineering time was reduced by around 50%. Imagine how much money that saves across an enterprise-level organization with dozens of designers and hundreds of engineers."
To ensure consistency, use actionable checklists. For example:
- Pre-release checklist: Update the changelog, run the full test suite, publish the release candidate, and notify users.
- Integration checklist: Verify dependency compatibility, smoke-test key user flows, and monitor bundle size changes.
Conduct regular technical audits – every quarter or release cycle – to identify and address any gaps in your versioning and integration workflows.
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Accessibility, Usability, and Quality Checklist
A design system that doesn’t work across devices or leaves users out of the equation loses its purpose. To prevent this, clear governance and thorough documentation are essential. These foundations ensure that accessibility, cross-platform functionality, and performance remain priorities. In the U.S., regulations like Section 508 make accessibility not just a best practice but, in many cases, a legal necessity.
The tricky part? Quality can degrade over time. A component that met accessibility standards six months ago might fail today due to an overlooked update. For instance, adding a new variant without proper ARIA labels could break compliance. Similarly, a lightweight button might become bloated after careless dependency updates. Regular audits, clear documentation, and automated checks are key to catching these issues before they impact users.
Accessibility Audits
Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 standards isn’t a one-and-done task. Teams need a repeatable checklist based on the four accessibility principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. For each component, check key factors like:
- Color contrast: Ensure text meets minimum contrast ratios (4.5:1 for regular text, 3:1 for larger text).
- Focus states and navigation: Verify logical tab order and visible focus indicators.
- Keyboard accessibility: Confirm components work without a mouse.
- Semantic HTML: Use elements correctly so screen readers can interpret content accurately.
While automated tools can flag basic issues, manual testing is irreplaceable. For example, a tool might confirm a modal has an ARIA label, but it can’t assess whether that label is meaningful for a screen reader user. Similarly, it won’t catch if focus gets trapped when the modal closes. Testing user flows with just a keyboard and then with screen readers like NVDA or VoiceOver helps uncover these subtleties. Document any issues, noting severity, affected components, and ownership.
Make accessibility part of your sprint workflow. Assign severity levels (critical, high, medium, low) and ensure each issue has a clear owner and a target sprint for resolution. This incremental approach avoids piling up issues into a daunting backlog.
Each component’s documentation should include an Accessibility section. Specify ARIA attributes (e.g., aria-label for icon-only buttons), keyboard behavior (e.g., arrow keys for navigating tabs), and focus management rules (e.g., returning focus to the trigger element when a modal closes). Include code examples showing correct implementations alongside common mistakes. For instance, if role="button" is often misused on non-interactive elements, highlight a “don’t” example with the correct alternative.
Tie guidelines to relevant WCAG success criteria. For example, if a button must have a minimum height of 44px, reference WCAG 2.5.5 (Target Size) and explain how this benefits users with motor impairments. These details help teams validate their work during design and code reviews without needing deep accessibility expertise.
Schedule accessibility reviews regularly – quarterly is a practical cadence – and align them with design system updates. Make accessibility checks a formal part of your "definition of done." No component should be considered complete until it passes both automated and manual accessibility tests.
Tools like UXPin can help teams validate keyboard flows, focus behavior, and component states in interactive prototypes before development begins. Prototyping with code-backed components allows designers to catch issues early, such as a dropdown menu that isn’t keyboard-navigable or focus that doesn’t move correctly through a multi-step form. Addressing these problems upfront reduces the need for fixes later and ensures accessibility is built into the design.
Cross-Platform and Responsive Design
Your design system must work seamlessly across the devices your users rely on. In the U.S., this typically includes iPhones, Android devices, tablets, and desktops. Start by defining a target device matrix that covers these platforms.
For each device and breakpoint, check that components maintain their layout, tap targets meet the minimum size (44px × 44px for touch interfaces), typography scales properly, and both touch and keyboard interactions perform as expected. Identify issues like overlapping components, excessive scrolling, or unusable elements, and feed these findings back into your design tokens and specifications to prevent recurring problems.
Use responsive preview tools and emulators during development, but always test on actual devices. While an emulator might show a button as tappable, only real-world testing can reveal if the tap target is too small or awkwardly positioned near the screen edge.
Component documentation should address both touch and pointer-based devices. For instance, if a component relies on hover states to display additional options, provide alternative interactions for touch devices. Specify minimum touch target sizes and ensure enough spacing between interactive elements to avoid accidental taps. These guidelines help teams create components that feel intuitive on any platform.
Interactive prototypes built with tools like UXPin allow designers to test layouts across different contexts before handing them off to engineers. By using custom design systems within the prototyping tool, teams can validate behaviors like navigation menus collapsing correctly on mobile or data tables remaining functional on tablets. Early validation minimizes the risk of inconsistencies between design and implementation.
Performance Monitoring
Performance issues in a design system can snowball fast. A single component adding 50 KB to the bundle might seem minor, but when used across dozens of pages, it can significantly impact load times. To prevent this, engineering teams need visibility into how design system updates affect application performance.
Use build tools to track per-component bundle sizes over time. Set thresholds to flag changes – for example, any pull request that increases the bundle size by more than 10 KB or pushes the total size above 200 KB should trigger a review. Automating these checks within your CI pipeline ensures performance regressions don’t slip through.
Monitor metrics like initial render time and interaction latency for key components. Profiling tools and real user monitoring can measure how long it takes for a modal to open, a dropdown to expand, or a data table to render. Label these components in logs so performance issues can be traced back to their source and optimized. For example, if a complex select component takes 300ms to render, consider solutions like lazy loading or virtualization.
Automate performance checks to compare current metrics against a baseline, and require targeted reviews for significant changes. These reviews help teams weigh trade-offs between visual richness and efficiency. Sometimes, creating a "lite" variant of a component – like a simplified table for pages with hundreds of rows – is the best solution.
Document performance considerations in your component specifications. If a component includes animations or dependencies that affect speed, explain these trade-offs and recommend when and where to use it. For instance, a carousel with rich animations might work well on a marketing page but be unsuitable for a fast-loading dashboard.
By using reusable, performance-conscious component libraries in design and prototyping tools, teams can preview behavior and constraints before implementation. These performance metrics, combined with accessibility and responsiveness checks, form a comprehensive quality assurance framework, reducing the risk of performance issues in production.
Incorporate clear checklists for accessibility, responsiveness, and performance into design reviews, grooming sessions, and release processes. These checklists turn expectations into routine practice. Regular knowledge-sharing sessions and concise release notes help distributed teams stay aligned, adopt updated components, and avoid creating workarounds that compromise system quality.
Tooling, Automation, and Workflow Checklist
Keeping a design system up-to-date manually is a daunting task, especially as it grows. The right tools can take over repetitive tasks, cut down on errors, speed up releases, and allow teams to focus on improving the system rather than getting bogged down with administrative work.
The tricky part? Picking tools that seamlessly connect design, code, and production without creating silos. For instance, if a designer updates a button variant, that change should flow effortlessly through prototypes, documentation, and deployed applications. Similarly, when engineers push a new component version, it should trigger automatic tests and documentation updates. Disconnected workflows lead to inconsistencies and extra work. Automation bridges these gaps, making updates smoother and more reliable.
Design and Prototyping Tools
Your design system’s components need to be accessible where designers work. If designers can’t find the latest button styles, form inputs, or navigation patterns in their prototyping tools, they’ll either recreate them or use outdated versions. This mismatch between design files and the coded system leads to extra work during handoff.
Organize components into categories like foundations, atoms, molecules, and templates, paired with clear usage guidelines and status labels (e.g., stable, experimental, deprecated). This structure helps designers locate the right components quickly and understand when and how to use them. Keeping these libraries synced with the codebase is essential. If a component’s behavior or properties change in the code, the design library should reflect those updates.
Tools like UXPin allow teams to design with real React components, enabling designers to test interactions, states, and data-driven behaviors before engineers write production code. For example, a designer working on a multi-step form can verify that focus moves correctly between fields, error messages display appropriately, and conditional logic works as expected – all within the prototype. Catching these issues early saves time and effort later.
Brian Demchak, Sr. UX Designer at AAA Digital & Creative Services, shared how his team integrated their custom React Design System with UXPin:
"We have fully integrated our custom-built React Design System and can design with our coded components. It has increased our productivity, quality, and consistency, streamlining our testing of layouts and the developer handoff process."
This approach eliminates translation errors between design and development. Components in prototypes include accessibility attributes, keyboard navigation, and responsive behaviors, allowing teams to validate these details before development begins.
A practical workflow starts with prototyping new or updated components in realistic user scenarios. Use these prototypes for usability testing or stakeholder reviews, and only add patterns that meet acceptance criteria to the official design library. Collaboration between design and engineering is key – review interaction details like states, transitions, and accessibility together to ensure they align with technical standards and platform requirements.
Mark Figueiredo, Sr. UX Team Lead at T. Rowe Price, highlighted the efficiency gains from this process:
"What used to take days to gather feedback now takes hours. Add in the time we’ve saved from not emailing back-and-forth and manually redlining, and we’ve probably shaved months off timelines."
For teams working in the U.S., ensure your design libraries include components that align with local formats – like dates in month/day/year, currency in dollars, and measurements in feet and inches. Prototyping tools should allow locale-switching previews so designers can confirm interfaces respect regional expectations without duplicating files.
Automation and CI Pipelines
Beyond design tools, robust CI pipelines are critical for maintaining a reliable design system. Continuous integration pipelines act as the system’s safety net, ensuring that every proposed change – whether a new component, token update, or documentation edit – is thoroughly tested before being merged.
Set up CI pipelines to run automated checks like linting, unit tests, and visual regression tests for every pull request. Linting ensures code and design tokens follow established guidelines. Unit tests confirm components behave correctly under various conditions, while visual regression tests flag even minor layout or style changes by comparing screenshots or DOM snapshots to a baseline.
Implement branch protection rules to prevent merging pull requests unless all CI checks pass. This safeguards the main branch from regressions that could disrupt downstream products. If visual regression tests detect differences, maintainers can quickly decide whether the change is intentional and update the baseline, or fix an issue before release.
Automating documentation updates is another time-saver. Instead of manually revising usage guidelines whenever a component changes, configure your build process to extract metadata from component files and generate documentation pages automatically. This ensures everyone has access to up-to-date, accurate information.
Deprecation workflows also benefit from automation. Mark components as deprecated in both code and design tools, provide clear migration paths, and use CI to flag deprecated items still in use. This approach helps teams transition smoothly without relying on outdated dependencies.
Analytics and Usage Tracking
Automated tests and documentation are essential, but tracking how components are used in the real world provides valuable insights for future improvements. Knowing which components are widely used – or overlooked – helps teams prioritize their efforts. Without this data, you might waste time refining a little-used component while neglecting a high-traffic one that impacts many users.
Track metrics like how often components are used, how frequently they’re customized, and where they’re duplicated or forked. These insights can reveal patterns that need attention. For example, if a component is rarely used but often customized, it may not meet user needs. Teams can then decide whether to create a more flexible version, simplify it, or deprecate it.
Design library analytics can show which components designers use most often, while code repository analytics highlight duplication or forks. Live product analytics reveal how components perform in real scenarios, helping teams identify elements that cause friction or slow down interactions.
Documentation analytics also offer useful feedback. Monitor which pages get the most traffic, which search terms yield no results, and where users drop off. For example, if searches for "date picker mobile" return nothing, you might need to create a new component or fill a documentation gap. If a high-traffic usage page has low engagement, the examples might need improvement.
Establish a regular review schedule for analytics. Weekly reviews can address design library updates and triage issues. Monthly reviews can focus on usage data and reprioritizing the backlog. Quarterly reviews can tackle broader audits of libraries, tokens, and documentation. This consistent rhythm helps treat the design system as a product that requires ongoing care rather than sporadic fixes.
Assign clear ownership for CI configurations, analytics dashboards, and tool integrations. Schedule periodic audits of pipelines and dashboards, and hold feedback sessions with designers and engineers. This ensures automation stays aligned with team workflows and that metrics remain relevant for decision-making. Letting tools and workflows run on autopilot risks them falling out of sync with team needs.
Maintenance Run Template
Keeping your design system in top shape requires regular attention. A maintenance run template helps streamline this process by embedding routine checks and updates into your workflow. By following a structured approach, you can stay ahead of potential issues and avoid last-minute fixes.
A good rule of thumb is to run maintenance sessions every 4–8 weeks, with a more comprehensive review each quarter. Keep these sessions short but effective – 60 to 120 minutes is ideal – and stick to a consistent agenda that addresses all key areas.
Standard Maintenance Agenda
A well-organized agenda ensures your maintenance sessions are productive. By breaking the meeting into focused sections, you can tackle immediate concerns while also planning for future improvements.
Start with a pre-work review before the session. Assign someone to gather unresolved issues, feedback from team members, and performance metrics. This preparation saves meeting time and ensures everyone comes ready to contribute. Look at analytics to identify which components are most used, which documentation pages are popular, and where users encounter friction.
Kick off the session with a state of the system check-in (10–15 minutes). Review the overall health of your design system by examining key metrics. For example, check how often components are being customized or duplicated, as this might indicate unmet needs. Look for deprecated components still in use or spikes in support requests that point to confusion or inefficiencies.
Next, move into feedback and backlog triage (20–30 minutes). Organize incoming issues by their impact, such as user experience challenges, accessibility problems, performance concerns, or team efficiency improvements. Use a simple prioritization system to balance effort against impact. Address critical issues – like accessibility violations or major bugs – in the next sprint, while lower-priority items can be scheduled for future updates.
Spend time auditing design tokens and components (30–40 minutes). Check that design tokens like colors, typography, and spacing match what’s live in production. Ensure components meet brand and accessibility standards and behave consistently across platforms. Identify any deprecated elements still lingering in your libraries or codebases, and document gaps that require updates or new components.
Review documentation quality (15–20 minutes). Ensure pages are accurate, clear, and aligned with recent changes. Retire outdated content and fill in any gaps with examples or improved structure. If analytics reveal high-traffic pages with low engagement, it may signal the need for better examples or clearer explanations.
Plan for deprecations and breaking changes (15–20 minutes). Identify components slated for removal, outline migration paths to newer patterns, and set realistic timelines. Communicate these updates through changelogs, announcements, and upgrade guides. Clearly mark deprecated components in both design and code libraries to prevent their use in new projects.
Wrap up the session with action assignment and communication (10–15 minutes). Assign tasks, set deadlines, and decide how to share updates with the broader team. Determine what should go into release notes, what requires training or additional documentation, and what needs follow-up in the next maintenance run.
This agenda provides a reliable framework for keeping your design system in check. While the timing for each section can be adjusted, the sequence ensures all critical areas are covered.
Tracking Maintenance Tasks
Use a simple tracking table to monitor progress and accountability. Include columns for Checklist Item, Owner, Frequency, Status, and Notes:
| Checklist Item | Owner | Frequency | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Review component usage analytics | Design System Lead | Monthly | Complete | Button component customized in 40% of instances – investigate flexibility needs. |
| Audit color tokens against production | Designer | Quarterly | In Progress | Found 3 legacy tokens still in use; creating a migration plan. |
| Run accessibility audit on form components | Accessibility Specialist | Bi-monthly | Not Started | Scheduled for 1/15/2026. |
| Update documentation for navigation patterns | Technical Writer | As needed | Complete | Added mobile-specific examples and keyboard navigation details. |
| Deprecate old modal component | Engineering Lead | One-time | In Progress | Migration guide published; removal scheduled for 2/1/2026. |
| Test responsive behavior of card components | QA Engineer | Quarterly | Complete | All breakpoints validated; no issues found. |
| Review CI pipeline performance | DevOps | Monthly | Complete | Build time reduced from 8 to 5 minutes after optimization. |
The Notes column is particularly useful for capturing context and tracking decisions over time. Update this tracker during each maintenance session and make it accessible to everyone involved in the design system.
For teams using tools like UXPin, maintenance runs can be even more efficient. Code-backed components allow designers to test changes in realistic scenarios before they’re implemented. This minimizes back-and-forth between design and engineering, ensuring updates work as intended before they go live.
Regular maintenance sessions help you catch small issues before they escalate, keep documentation accurate, and ensure your design system continues to meet team needs. Use this template to stay organized and maintain momentum in your continuous improvement efforts.
Conclusion
The true strength of a design system lies in its continuous care and attention. Regular updates and maintenance ensure it evolves into a scalable, dependable resource that grows alongside your products and teams. By keeping components, tokens, and documentation aligned with current needs, designers and engineers can work more efficiently, avoiding inconsistencies and unforeseen issues.
Incorporating a maintenance routine into your workflow can save time and build trust. Start small – a monthly audit, a quarterly documentation review, or a bi-weekly bug triage session – and stick with it for a few months. Use the provided checklist as a foundation: add it to your project management tool, assign clear responsibilities, and set deadlines. These small, steady efforts can lead to meaningful improvements, creating a system that’s both robust and reliable.
Code-backed components help bridge the gap between design and development, making updates – like token adjustments or accessibility enhancements – easier to implement across multiple products. Larry Sawyer, Lead UX Designer, shared this insight:
"When I used UXPin Merge, our engineering time was reduced by around 50%. Imagine how much money that saves across an enterprise-level organization with dozens of designers and hundreds of engineers."
Measure success with simple metrics: fewer system-related bugs, higher adoption rates for official libraries, and shorter handoff times between design and development. Pay attention to qualitative feedback too – reduced reliance on ad-hoc patterns and improved satisfaction in internal surveys signal that teams trust and depend on the system.
With disciplined upkeep, your design system becomes a tool for efficiency, not a roadblock. Treat the checklist as a living document, adapting it to fit your team’s needs. By making maintenance a routine, you’ll create a system that scales with your organization, minimizes risks, and earns the trust of everyone who relies on it. A well-maintained design system isn’t just a resource – it’s a long-term investment in your organization’s success.
FAQs
What steps can organizations take to maintain effective governance and ownership of their design systems?
To keep design systems running smoothly and effectively, organizations need to set up clear roles and responsibilities for their teams. Having a dedicated design system manager or team in place ensures someone is always accountable for updates and maintenance.
It’s also important to regularly revisit and refresh the design system. This keeps it aligned with changing brand standards, user expectations, and new technologies. Bringing together designers, developers, and stakeholders for collaboration helps maintain consistency while allowing flexibility to adapt when needed.
Lastly, make sure guidelines and processes are well-documented. Clear documentation ensures everyone on the team knows how to use the system and contribute to it. This approach keeps things consistent while giving teams the freedom to create within defined boundaries.
What are the common challenges of keeping design system documentation up-to-date, and how can they be solved?
Keeping design system documentation current isn’t always easy. Shifting design standards, irregular updates, and limited teamwork can leave resources outdated or incomplete, slowing down your team’s workflow.
To tackle this, start by setting up a well-defined update process. Assign specific roles to team members to ensure accountability, and schedule regular reviews, especially after major design updates. Leverage tools with real-time collaboration features and built-in version control to keep everyone on the same page. Finally, invite feedback from both designers and developers – this collaborative input can highlight missing pieces and elevate the overall quality of your documentation.
Why is it important to regularly review and update design tokens and UI libraries in a design system?
Keeping your design tokens and UI libraries up to date is key to ensuring a cohesive and effective design system. Regular reviews help keep everything in sync with your brand guidelines, address user expectations, and adapt to new technology trends.
By conducting audits, you can spot outdated components, resolve inconsistencies, and simplify processes for both designers and developers. This kind of forward-thinking maintenance reduces technical debt, enhances teamwork, and supports a smooth, unified user experience across all platforms.
