The “Invisible Business Risks” of Service Diversification : Design Systems That Support Sustainable Corporate Growth as a Management Resource | Insights

Our present era, which is characterized by companies rapidly diversifying their services thanks to the advance of digital technology, comes with often overlooked but nevertheless serious business risks. These risks are, namely, the weakening of business foundations brought about by the separation of user experience and development.
That is, services come to work differently, despite being offered by the same company, and even terminology stops being consistent. This sort of fragmentary experience creates confusion and distrust on the part of users and ultimately contributes to reducing trust in the brand itself.
Behind this lies the fact that each project is going through the design process in isolation, so insights are not being shared, leading to a buildup of inefficiencies in development. While this may look like a speedy approach at first glance, without proper foundations, companies end up plagued by adjustments and redesigns, which ultimately become a factor preventing sustainable growth.
In this Insight, we cover “design systems” that build shared platforms across services and organizations as an effective framework for addressing the dual challenges of fragmentation of user experience and organizational and development inefficiency. Design systems go beyond just unifying UI design or improving development efficiency. Rather, they play the role of a “management resource,” the purpose of which is to build systems that can grow the company sustainably and be resilient to change. We investigate the potential of this approach, looking at how we have practiced it ourselves at ABeam Consulting.

About the Author

Nana Hamaguchi

Manager

1. The User Experience Fragmentation Brought on by Service Inconsistency

Recent years have seen an explosion of digital services at many companies. With the emergence of cloud computing technology and generative AI, the speed with which companies can launch new services has risen dramatically. Development work that previously took months can now often take shape in as little as weeks. These conditions present tremendous opportunities for companies, but also give rise to new risks for users.
The more services arise, the greater the fragmentation in user experience becomes. The positioning of buttons differs per app, despite coming from the same company. Terminology becomes inconsistent and workflows are all over the place. Users end up having to relearn how to use a company’s services each time, increasing learning costs in terms of time, effort and resources.
What happens if things keep on like this? When users encounter a completely different user interface right after they thought they had gotten used to the old one, they experience confusion and stress. This leads to users giving up on using those services. It also creates a sense of distrust because the services are all different even though it’s the same company, which leads directly to lower trust in the brand itself.
In other words, service inconsistency is a problem that goes beyond just “differences in appearance.” Forcing users to bear excessive learning costs not only harms the user experience, it risks damaging the brand as an asset itself. The inconvenience experienced by customers ultimately rebounds to businesses in the form of customers leaving.

2. Organizational and Development Inefficiencies Brought on by Service Diversification

The fragmentation of the user experience is no more than a surface-level problem. Beneath lies an even more serious problem in the form of inefficiency on the organization and development end.
Developing diversified services while incorporating new technology is the right decision for companies in terms of growth strategy. Proactively pioneering new domains in the form of generative AI and IoT is an effective way for companies to provide customers with new value and secure their competitive edge. But if each service starts to design UIs based on its own rules, the company will lose its sense of overall consistency, leading to deep inefficiency on the ground for developers.
Specifically, the improvement insights gained in one service will not be shared with other services. Development teams will each design UIs from scratch over and over again, and learnings will not be shared horizontally. Even if using external vendors, the coding and design rules in place at each vendor will differ, leading to friction and inconsistencies each time their deliverables are combined. Fixing and adjusting these issues will eat up massive amounts of time, increasing the cost of operations and maintenance.
Put another way, working this way interferes with sharing organizational knowledge and lowers development speed. As market competition accelerates, this can prove to be a fatal wound. What can seem on the surface to be a win in terms of “speed” may, in time, make sustainable growth impossible if it is not backed by unified foundations. This means that a company remains competitively weak on the whole-of-company scale, even as it stacks up isolated successes, if it lacks companywide foundations.

3. Design Systems as “Experience Platforms”

So, how do we overcome these dual issues? Designs systems serve precisely as a mechanism for solving both these “external issues” (fragmentation of the user experience) and “internal issues” (organizational and development inefficiency) at once.
While often misunderstood, design systems are neither catalogues of mere UI components nor guidelines on picking colors and fonts. The essence of a design system is to be the “experience platform” that allows users to get a consistent experience no matter what service they come into contact with. This goes beyond just making things look a consistent way to systematize everything including component usage rules, information design principles and unity of interactions.
The aim of all this is more than just efficiency. Rather, it lies in making the user feel that services are “fitting for that company,” and to increase the sense of comfort and trust that they feel. A consistent experience has the power to make users use services consistently without forcing them to incur learning costs. On the development side, meanwhile, it generates reusability and consistency, allowing developers to combine speed and quality.
In other words, design systems are both mechanisms for providing brand experiences that users trust and development platforms that let companies withstand the speed of the market. As a tool for bridging user and organizational challenges, design systems are growing in importance year on year.

4. Putting it Into Practice for Ourselves at ABeam Consulting

ABeam Consulting develops and offers multiple digital services and solutions in-house, in addition to doing so on behalf of clients.
Inconsistency in design rules across projects is a challenge that we ourselves have confronted directly in the process of doing so. In a large-scale organization, each project establishes its own policies based on user needs and market characteristics. Looking at this logically, this creates a companywide contradiction in that the look and usage of services varies widely, despite coming from the same company.
As a means to tackle this issue, we built a design system and put in place a companywide framework for its shared use. What we were aiming to do was more than just streamlining development. Rather, we wanted to deliver the same user experience across every service. In working to introduce the design system, what we found delivered tremendous results in practical terms was unifying the user experience across projects and standardizing with external partners.

Unifying the User Experience Across Projects

In the initial stages, it is natural for teams to take an approach where the scope of their thinking is limited to their project alone. Taking a step back to look at it from a design perspective, the trap we were falling into was one of partial rather overall optimization. Understanding the entirety of other projects from within each project is impractical, making it difficult to plan and provide a consistent user experience, even as teams seek to grasp project overviews and coordinate with one another.
They key to addressing these issues is a user-first approach based on human-centered design (HCD). Anticipating issues that could arise in future, such as users wondering why services work differently despite coming from the same company or being confused because terminology is not consistent, and making the user perspective the central axis of decision making, we built a design system that acts as the driving force behind a consistent design and user experience, achieving unity of user experience beyond the scope of any individual project. Also important was that we were able to share a broader time axis along which unifying the user experience helped build long-term trust. This positioned the design system as a strategic brand platform, rather than just a way of streamlining development.

Standardizing with External Partners

By putting in place a design system as a “shared language,” we made it so that external partners or new team members could catch up in a short span of time.
In terms of quantitative impacts, this reduced UI development work hours by roughly 40%. This was due in large part to making it easier to align people when starting projects, in addition to streamlining development through the reuse of components. By getting this part of the work done without having to discuss it from scratch each time, we were able to arrive at a common direction quickly.
In terms of qualitative outcomes, we saw increased unity in teams. New team members and partners could get used to the system quickly, and people were more easily able to work as colleagues aligned around the same goals.
As a secondary outcome, this mechanism went beyond individual projects and was able to be reused in deploying other services or doing additional development work. The result was that a one-off streamlining effort grew to a companywide asset and became a platform for realizing a suite of services that have a unified user experience.

5. Management Resources that Contribute to the Futures of Companies

The conclusions we gained from this experience are clear. Design systems are not just a matter for design departments. They are management resources that are resilient to change.
Market conditions are constantly changing and new technologies and services are constantly emerging. Starting on redesigns from scratch each time the market changes will mean losing in the competition for speed. If companies have a common platform, however, they can maintain consistency of experience even as they add new services and thus combine development efficiency with quality.
Implementing this takes “cross-project initiatives” and “prioritizing the user-perspective.” Optimizing on the level of individual projects will only further drive fragmentation. Achieving a consensus around how to define the brand experience through cross-organizational discussions and incorporating this into design systems is essential.
Design systems also contribute to the human resource development and skill succession. Mechanisms that let new team members and external partners catch up quickly play an important role for companies in an era of labor shortages as intellectual asset that they can build up.
This is because it allows users to keep using services with peace of mind and get the same experience no matter which service they come into contact with from among the increasingly complex suite of services on offer.
Design systems are mechanisms for supporting those consistent experiences and building up trust in brands, and are thus management resources that contribute to the future of a company.
Through our own application of this approach in house at ABeam Consulting, we have first-hand knowledge of how this approach can be a platform that goes beyond improving development efficiency and quality, supporting companywide trust and sustainable growth.
Based on these insights, we support clients in building mechanisms that support both more efficient development and brand value, while maintaining consistency of user experience amid an increasingly complex range of services and organizations.
These mechanisms are more than just ways of streamlining design and development. Instead, they represent efforts to redesign “overall experience value,” including business strategy, organizational operations and human resource development.
Going beyond design systems to reconstruct the “nature of management as a platform for experience consistency” is precisely what ABeam aspires to in pursuing co-creation.
ABeam Consulting leverages insights gained through first-hand, practical experience to construct shared platforms centered on design systems and build a socially sustainable future together with our clients.

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