Three years ago I thought design systems were just a figma file until our QA team found 12 button variants on one page

Last Tuesday I had to explain to a new dev why we don't just 'eyeball the spacing' and it took everything in me not to scream about the 6 month cleanup we did back in 2021 after that exact approach broke our entire checkout flow, has anyone else had to fight the 'it's just a button' argument five times a year?

2 comments

2 Comments

max3882d ago

Oh man, my buddy Dave had this exact thing happen at his last job. They let a senior dev "just tweak the button padding real quick" on a component and three weeks later the entire dashboard was using different size buttons on every single page. Their PM actually asked why they couldn't just "use the eyedropper tool to match the colors" when they tried to fix it. Took them a whole sprint to clean up that mess and the QA team found like 8 more button variants hiding in the footer nobody knew about.

paul_burns2d ago

Jeez, that sounds like a nightmare. I feel for your buddy Dave. Nothing worse than a simple "quick fix" turning into a full-blown design disaster. And a PM asking about an eyedropper tool? That just hurts to hear. It's crazy how one small change can snowball into something that eats up an entire sprint. Hope they locked down that component library after all that.