Our design system hit 50 components and everything got slower, not faster.

We spent 6 months building this library in Figma, thinking more parts meant more speed, but our devs started complaining about choice overload and decision fatigue last week. The surprise wasn't the number, it was realizing we'd built a system that was hard to use. Has anyone else seen a design system cross a line where it starts to hurt productivity?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamesblack22d ago

Our team hit 30 components and saw the same slowdown.

jennifere1821d ago

Thirty components really sounds like a lot to manage, but is that actually the main problem? A lot of setups can handle that without grinding to a halt. Maybe it's something else in the stack causing the slowdown. Have you checked the actual rendering cycles or state changes? Seems like there might be more to the story here.