The decisions nobody has to make

6 min read

A design system rarely fails on its components. It fails on the gaps between them: the spacing nobody wrote down, the hover state each team invents, the motion that feels right in one product and wrong in the next.

We started by listing every decision a designer made twice in the same week. Most of them were small: how long a menu takes to open, how far a card lifts, which easing a page transition uses. Each one became a token, with a name and a default.

Motion tokens were the hardest. A duration alone says little; what matters is the pair of a duration and a curve, and when to skip both. We settled on three speeds and one rule: under reduced motion, an element changes state without travelling.

Six months later, the questions changed. Teams no longer asked how long a transition should last. They asked whether it should exist at all, which is the question a system is meant to make easy.

The next step is to measure. Not the time spent on each decision, but the number of decisions nobody had to make, because the system had already made them well.