“It\u2019s like choosing furniture when you don\u2019t know how big your room is”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That\u2019s where systems thinking comes in.<\/p>\n
What is systems thinking in design?<\/h2>\n
Systems thinking in design is a top-down approach where companies consider the big picture first and the specific interactions later. Systems thinking helps product development and design teams establish a design system early, which sets the course of the product direction, gets everyone on the same page, and focuses design efforts on the most important product areas.<\/p>\n
Let me show you how we created a design system for our knowledge base product, Articles<\/a>, and how it helped.<\/p>\n Before we start, let\u2019s be crystal clear in our definition of what a system is. I like to use the definition given by Donella H. Meadow in her book, Thinking in Systems<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n “A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Using this definition gives me a set of simple questions to start asking:<\/p>\n These questions are the foundations of systems thinking, and armed with this thinking process you can start applying them to the specific problem you\u2019re going to tackle.<\/p>\n With Articles, we were creating a product to help users answer simple support questions themselves. This helps users resolve their questions faster, and lets support teams focus on questions that need deeper investigations.<\/p>\n So we asked ourselves: What are the core elements in this system? For us it was an \u201carticle\u201d \u2013 content written by the company to provide answers to common questions. It has an author, content, and ways for users to give feedback on the article.<\/p>\n So far, so easy.<\/p>\n Next, we mapped out how these elements were connected and their inputs and outputs. How do articles get created? How do articles get delivered to people?<\/p>\n Most of these questions have a domino effect. No sooner have you answered one question then you\u2019re left with another that needs answering. How do these elements feed back to one another? How does this system interact with other systems? By continuing to probe, we were left with the following system:<\/p>\n As you can see, what looks like a straightforward problem at the outset has an incredibly complex system behind it. Of course, we could have jumped headfirst into designing the atomic units of this system right way, but without everyone agreeing how these components interacted with one another, we would have got bogged down discussing unnecessary details without a clear vision of where we were heading.<\/p>\n If the above system seems like an overly complex approach to apply to your designs, let me bring you through a few of the ways that this approach can help you during the product execution phrase:<\/p>\nWhat exactly is a system?<\/h2>\n
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Applying systems thinking in practice<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/article.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/systems-design-1.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/Artboard@2x.png\")
<\/p>\nNever easy, always worth it<\/h2>\n
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