The bigger the company, the harder it is for it to maintain a unified visual style. This is what VK faced as well: different departments of the company perform similar tasks in their own way. In the design system, the same elements differ, for example, in the mobile and desktop versions.
We analyzed over a thousand mock-ups and five thousand components to understand what do with it all.
Such discrepancies, when local components are created in isolation from the general rules, lead to separating the final products from each other. Often, solutions are not entered into the common library, making interaction more complicated.
Working with components in different products of the same ecosystem should not be based on different principles. The order and hierarchy of libraries directly affect consistency.
Having formulated questions to the design system of the social network, we created specific recommendations and a clear action plan for updating the approach.
Each design team checks in with the diagram and determines how compliant it is.
As a result, product unification and the primacy of a single design system save a ton of time and help avoid performing the same tasks over and over again.
