Design System ROI: The Value of Building a Design System in edTech

When you design an edTech product for the first time, part of the fun is developing the visual styles you’ll use. You’ll choose the colors, typography, and user experience (UX) patterns that best reflect your brand and support teaching and learning.

Building a design system helps you collect all these choices in a systematic way, improving your team’s overall consistency. Design systems also document front-end code snippets, optimizing your work with developers. 

Once complete, this documentation effort helps your team:

• Update product features or components quickly
• Communicate needs with your learning content or development teams more effectively
• And onboard new designers to your team more efficiently

Most likely, though, you’re managing not just one edTech product, but an entire suite of learning tools.

Developed with intention, edTech design systems are flexible enough to create consistency across your entire product suite. 

This creates a stronger user experience, strengthens trust in your brand, and improves your internal processes for design and development across the board.

Put simply, the ROI of an edTech design system is worth every penny. 

Measured in fewer customer support calls, shorter product development timelines, and stronger learning outcomes—it’s priceless.

What is a design system?

A design system includes: 

• Building blocks for your edTech product that support both designers and developers, including components, front-end code snippets, and styles for buttons, icons, and typography
• Standards and guidance for implementing design

By building a repeatable system that incorporates rules and governance, you’ll ensure that your edTech products have both a consistent user experience and user interface.

Because let’s face it—how often have you used a new feature in a learning tool and realized that the product’s visual language has started to change?

Or, more confusing still, how often have you used edTech products that belong to the same suite of learning tools and noticed their interfaces all look and behave differently?

Design systems solve these types of inconsistent experiences, providing your design team with the building blocks and guidance they need to create learning tools that live up to your brand standards.

What makes design systems in edTech different?

edTech product design systems are often more complex than design systems for commercial products, which is why investing in one is so important.

Below, we’ve highlighted three elements that make edTech design systems unique: learning content components, grade bands, and accessibility needs.

edTech design systems and learning content

In order for teachers and learners to use your products successfully, you must create recognizable, repeatable design and interaction patterns that support your learning content.

By building these patterns into your design system and library, you’ll ensure that students and teachers alike can worry less about learning how to use your product—and focus more on learning content or practicing new skills.

Take our recent design of Starwriter, a handwriting instruction app for young learners, as an example. The entire design system only incorporated one button for students to interact with, a blue button with a white arrow. 

Because of design system documentation, designers and developers knew to place this button either in the middle of the screen or on the bottom right corner of the page.

It’s especially important to make and document these design choices when creating edTech products for young learners. 

Students who cannot yet read must know when and where to expect a simple interaction, so they can focus on learning content—not how to use an application.

edTech design systems and grade levels

In addition to documenting specialized components for learning content, an edTech design system also emphasizes color, typography, and theme. 

Each of these design elements will look very different by grade band. For instance:

Lower grades
For young learners, your design system might incorporate buttons with iconography rather than text. You can also expect bigger typography and brighter colors throughout the entire system. Overall, design systems for products targeted to lower grades are simpler because the interactive and content demands are less complex.

Middle school
UI decisions that appeal to and support middle school learners pull from design approaches for both lower grades and high school learners.

High school
Learners in high school appreciate design choices that make them feel a little more “grown up.” They might be teenagers or young adults, but they don’t want to be talked down to—even through visual language.Design systems for products aimed at high school students are often more complex.

edTech design systems and accessibility

All product design systems address accessibility in some way, but in educational settings accessibility becomes even more important.

Your design system will likely include a set of components dedicated to user settings, including:

• The ability to increase font size
• The ability to change color modes from dark to light
• The ability to turn on screen readers
• And more

Ideally, this section also has dedicated documentation to support design and development teams as they make decisions that affect accessibility for teachers and learners.

Assuming you’ve done the upfront work of designing highly accessible components as you go, your team can ensure that new design work is accessible from the start.

How design systems create ROI by optimizing for development hand-off

Throughout my years of experience, clients consistently underestimate the needs of developers. 

Translating designs into front- and back-end code requires extensive knowledge and labor. Simply following a style guide won’t cut it.

With a design system in place, you’ll provide developers with the extensive documentation they need to do their work well.

Design systems also use components that connect to real code snippets, optimizing the process for your front-end team. 

Tools like Storybook and ZeroHeight are great places for design and front-end dev collaboration, making this process even smoother.

Design systems also make processes like quality assurance easier and more efficient for everyone. Because you’ve already used the code many times, your design and dev teams know it will work.

But building a design system isn’t just about optimization. It’s an investment in maintaining the full lifecycle of front-end code and design UI—all while improving the quality of your learning tool.

Why you should invest in a design system

I know you constantly face challenges around bandwidth, timelines, and budgets. 

edTech product design requires prioritizing roadmap features, and it can be hard to make a case to move design infrastructure to the top of that list. 

But design systems are key to growing sustainably in the future.

With a design system in place, you’ll experience:

• Shorter design and development timelines
• Stronger collaborations with other stakeholders, like your learning content team
• Faster alignment on strategy, as the design team can bring stakeholders working prototypes more quickly
• More ease onboarding new designers and developers, thanks to the level of documentation a design system provides

In order to increase buy-in for your own stakeholders, you may even wish to emphasize time and cost savings by department. For instance:

• • In the design department: Designers become more consistent in how they solve user experience challenges, use consistent patterns to support user needs, and design with brand cohesiveness in mind. You can also onboard new designers very quickly to your entire brand or to individual products.
  • In content: When content teams have access to repeatable components, the iteration process for content becomes more flexible—and it becomes easier to build prototypes for proof-of-concept.
  • In front-end development: Because design components are coded the same way, their performance is consistent, saving your development team on time and labor.

By front loading your product design cycle, you’ll benefit from the investment in a well-documented design system for the next five to 10 years. 

Whether you’ve inherited new edTech products during an acquisition or you’re rolling out new features for your learning tool, a design system helps you streamline the entire design and development process.

Find out more about how we can help you build a sustainable design system for your learning tool—contact us below!