But "design systems as infrastructure" is boring, with Sam Anderson

Y’all, I’ll be honest. Some days, I’m scared and nervous and uncomfortable with AI’s emergence, and implications, too. But I am also curiously optimistic, and more importantly — I don’t want to use any platform I have to spread even more fear and discontent and drama. So today you’re getting a dose of two things that I love: infrastructure and optimism.

🎧 listen to Episode #16 with Sam Anderson on design systems as infrastructure, why AI makes that even more important, and the importance of patterns.

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Drawing from his experience leading design systems at three very large orgs, Sam shares how framing design systems as infrastructure can help them be recognized as essential to business success. He shares his vision for the importance of patterns as the next frontier of systems work, particularly in a rapidly changing tech landscape accelerated by AI, and we talk about what leadership conversations look like. Plus, Sam drops a spicy take that he believes AI won’t destroy design system jobs but make us even more valuable.

🎧 But "design systems as infrastructure" is boring, with Sam Anderson — #16 (47min)

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Sam:

I think that our job is still going to be to translate the brand into product, or into marketing or whatever your system is doing. And as you think about like code getting commoditized, or even experience design getting commoditized—and what I mean by commoditized is that more companies have the same abilities to create the same experiences.

We've seen that great leveling up. Like when Google Maps very first came out, and suddenly you can move the map around, you can zoom in and zoom out of it. That was stuff we'd never seen before in MapQuest, right? It blew our minds. But very quickly, like everybody else figures out how to do that as well.

And so technology commoditizes and eats itself over time. But what will never be a commodity is a brand that you've built. So translating that brand through your design system is still a critical step, particularly in the AI future.

Because in an AI future where agents are writing code, code is being created and tested on the fly, not necessarily always handcrafted, your brand is what you have. Your brand is all you have. Your brand is your biggest asset. It's how you instill trust with your customers, and how your customers will continue to rely on you or want to rely on you.

And I think that will emanate from, that will come from the design system. Design systems will continue to translate the brand for the customer, because the fastest way to deliver anything to a customer is going to be with the design system.

And as these AI tools come into designer's hands, the language that's going to be used under the covers is the design system. We are defining the design language for the company. We're defining the language for the LLM or the model to use to create experiences that we can look at and say, yes, that's a great experience. Let's ship that to our customer.

The job of design systems is still very critical in a world where AI is helping us do everything.

Elyse:

I completely agree. I think there's so much room to think beyond the way that we do our jobs now and the things that we deliver now.

The foundations, that's not really the real value of the design system. And as those pieces get even more commoditized— and I mean that in a good way, right? Like how many ways are there to build an input? There's just, there's only so many. We have so many examples of really great inputs that do just about anything that you could ever need them to do, that we can use.

So what does that free us up to do? What if we expanded our horizons of what work we have to do and, and where we get to play, in the UI and UX space?

Sam:

I focused a lot on like how I think designers work will change, or how AI will change what we do. Make no mistake, I believe also, AI will change the products we're building for customers. And so the interaction designs, the interaction models of the past, may not be the interaction models of the future.

As you think about, like with ChatGPT, or the various different sort of chat-based interfaces that have come out, they're just chat-based interfaces. We've had chat-based interfaces for a long time. That's not the revolutionary new interaction model.

But agents represent a potentially revolutionary new interaction model. Like how does a real person know what an agent is doing on their behalf? How do they inspect their work? How do they start an agent and stop an agent? How do we verify and trust throughout the journey of AI doing something, that it's doing it accurately on our behalf.

There are gonna be new emerging interface design. And I'm here for that. I think that's gonna be exciting. I think that's a great thing for us to be focused on as a design community in the coming future.

Elyse:

So, this is a tough question because I'm gonna ask you to speculate about a future, and I feel like AI predictions, total toss up.

Sam:

At your own peril!

Elyse:

We definitely don't know, we're totally speculating here, but thinking about design systems as infrastructure and some of these potential new ways that we might work, or things that we might build, how do you see design systems supporting those things in the future?

Sam:

I think the untapped value of systems is in the patterns. And so that's something we're leaning into heavily right now in Intuit, particularly as we think about AI in the future.

We believe that the design system should contain relevant and well-tested interaction patterns, that AI based experiences will use throughout the products. So we don't need to re-design from one product to the other how a user would verify something that AI read and transcribed for them. There could be just one sort of pattern or component that does that, that was well tested, and we know that customers love.

And that's also a platform capability. So our products can reach down to the platform, ask the platform to process that for us, we send it back to the interface, to the customer, right? The customer just saw this really performant, magical experience. And maybe they use multiples of our product, and so maybe they get used to seeing the same experience or having that same experience in multiple places.

That's, I think, a key value that design systems will bring to future product development.

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See you next episode!,

Elyse