Tim Paul: Measuring the value of the GOV.UK Design System / Gov Design Meetup #14

This presentation details the success of the WK design system within a government organization. Key achievements include a 250% increase in website usage, 16,000 daily front-end installs, and usage across 1500+ repositories. While precise productivity gains are difficult to quantify, an economic model estimates annual savings exceeding £17 million, demonstrating a strong return on investment and highlighting the system's value in improving efficiency and service delivery. This segment details the methods used to track design system usage, including analyzing website traffic via Google Analytics and tracking code deployments through NPM. The speaker explains the limitations of each approach, emphasizing the challenges of obtaining accurate and comprehensive usage data in a large, decentralized organization.This segment explores further methods for measuring design system usage, focusing on Github's dependency graph and user interviews to understand the benefits. The speaker discusses the challenges of inferring usage from code repositories and the difficulties of obtaining reliable quantitative data on productivity gains through user interviews. The segment highlights the need for conservative estimations and the importance of observing upward trends in usage metrics.This segment focuses on the methodology used to estimate productivity gains from design system usage. It describes user interviews conducted to gather qualitative data on how the design system improved team workflows and productivity. The speaker explains how these qualitative insights were used, along with other data, to create a rough estimate of productivity improvements, acknowledging the limitations of small sample sizes and the complexities of quantifying such gains. This segment highlights the core problem of demonstrating the value of a design system, focusing on the difficulty of measuring its impact and the two key questions that need to be answered: who is using the system and how are they benefiting? The speaker introduces the complexities involved in assessing the return on investment for a design system within a large organization. This segment highlights the limitations of solely focusing on the financial benefits of design systems within government. The speaker cautions against viewing design systems as mere efficiency tools, emphasizing that prioritizing cost savings over the quality of public services can lead to detrimental consequences. The speaker stresses that the ultimate goal should be to create better public services, requiring continuous investment rather than solely aiming for cost reduction. This perspective offers valuable insights into the long-term implications of prioritizing efficiency over quality in public service design.