When does your product need a custom design?

We are good at copying. It took a while for humanity to come up with a printing press, centuries to build first manufactories, dozens of years to invent conveyors. And now, we live in a digital world, where copying takes seconds and costs literally nothing.

by Alec Vishmidt Business

We live in an era where creating custom designs and deploying digital solutions is easier than ever. With templates, frameworks, and boilerplates, launching a prototype can happen in seconds. But when does your product require custom design development to truly stand out?

The same questions apply to the user experience and user interface. So, what are our options here?

Use existing templates. With thousands of UI kits, templates, and themes available for as little as $20–$100, you get ready-made components, layouts, and animations.
Create custom designs from scratch. This approach involves custom design development to craft a unique user experience tailored to your brand new design. A dedicated design team is typically required to develop a fully custom solution from the ground up.
Use a customized design system. A design system is more than a user interface kit or a set of patterns, but a process that includes components, patterns, layouts, within rules of their implementation and maintenance.

When making the choice, consider your product’s scalability, brand identity, and long-term user experience needs. Custom design development is often the key to standing out in a competitive digital landscape.

Let us go ahead and review each of those options!

Using an existing UI kit, template, or theme

This is the cheapest way to get a visually clean and consistent system as a result. This approach suits well for quick idea verification, some internal tools development, and prototypes building.

A template or UI kit is an archive containing a list of files that includes pre-built components and custom assets like icons and fonts. Some UI kits are purely visual mockups and may require additional conversion into code, so it's important to verify the supported technologies before purchasing. With the template, you will get:

A set of most used components: buttons, input fields, grids, menus, icons, etc.
Components that are ready for immediate use by the development team (if you selected the right template, of course).
Visual consistency and attractiveness (you could select something that appeals to your personal visual taste).

However, even the most advanced UI kit lacks the next items you might miss:

Branding and styling. UI Kit would not help your system look different and stand out of a crowd, and implementing custom styling is often costly.
Custom components. If something in your products appears to be custom, or there is no applicable item from the template, you would need to find a way how to implement it by using sub-optimal components or inviting a designer into the process.
Flexibility in decision-making. With a theme, you should follow some theme-defined technical rules, and you will face lots of restrictions that would not have easy solutions.
Guidelines and best practices. Even you have a super-set of Lego bricks, there is no plan or instruction for how they should be combined in a meaningful experience.

Starting with a brand new design for custom design development

User experience design is a service focused on creating and verifying hypotheses around customer behavior to improve business indicators such as customer satisfaction, conversion, and retention rates. Designers research the business domain, predict user interactions, create custom user interfaces based on those predictions, and deliver mockups to the development team.

What you get while working with a designer or a design team:

A set of mockups, components, layouts, and patterns, created for immediate use by the development team, adjusted by development team needs and requests.
Intermediary results that could help in understanding your customer — customer journey maps, customer persona profiles, logical diagrams, process flows, etc.
Unique styling, either created from scratch or following brand guidelines, integrated with design frameworks for consistency.
Visual and logical consistency and a solid reference for further quality assurance. Quality assurance engineers are happy when they have visual references of a product to compare with.
Around 50% of the functional requirements in a visual form that could be requested by the development team. Developers are always happy when someone could answer their design-related questions.
Vast experience and knowledge of leading practices gathered by a designer from other verticals, industries, and systems.

With all this being stated, here are some points you need to be aware of:

There are lots of designers, teams, and agencies around the globe, with an exciting look and feel and pleasurable first experience (that’s our bread and butter!). But finding the right design partner that you are comfortable with in terms of communication, quality, speed, and the price tag could be time-consuming. And there is no other way except for just trying and verifying.
The design process is time-consuming. As a rough benchmark, one designer-month is needed per 3–5 developer-months. For large systems, this proportion could shift to 1-to-10, but those occasions are rare.
Design is not cheap. It includes business domain research, competitor analysis, and plenty of background work to supply a development team with high-quality results that smoothen the whole process. Those results could be barely visible if you don’t know what they are needed for.

Using a design system to create custom designs

A design system is a blend of pre-built components with a set of custom design items: branding and style guidelines, functional requirements, and some of the leading practices.

The design system brings its unique flavor while also allowing the creation of custom designs. As a “system,” it supports a collaborative process, empowered with components and rules. It helps people from various branches work together and achieve consistent results. The collaboration process, based on the design system, enables teams from development, design, marketing, and support to have one source of truth and predictability of changes.

So, what does the design system mean, and what it has inside?

A design system is an internal portal, or a knowledge base, that consists of answers to most questions, related to customer experience. Starting from brand philosophy and vision, ending with colors of each button type.
A design system should have guidelines and rules on how to build a consistent user experience, but also how to keep it reliable and persistent in the future.
A design system enables teams to collaborate and generate meaningful customer-related results together, speeding up decision making and decreasing the number of internal trials and errors.

Still, the design system has its weak points:

A design system should always be adjusted for the specific needs of a company, as there is no philosophy, no vision that could be just taken from someone else and work smoothly in the boundaries of another company.
A design system requires attention and a bit of maintenance, at it should adapt to arriving challenges and market changes.
A design system is less practical and more theoretical. It does not provide strict answers for practical challenges but rather tells how to find answers repetitively.

Selecting the optimal way to proceed

Given with all pros and cons, and relying on our failures and successes, we think each way works well for the exact audience, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. What we could recommend then?

Take template in case:

— You don’t have a product and want to bootstrap and verify your idea; — You are in a rush to deliver your product; — Your development or product team has a perfect aesthetic sense and a high level of proactiveness; — You have a tight budget and are ready to re-do everything later; — You don’t plan to expose your product to a large market or serious clients; — You want to create custom designs but are okay with starting with a template for faster iteration.

Consider a brand new design in case:

— You want to enhance your existing product KPIs; — You are unsure how your product will perform in the digital world; — You are ready to invest in your product marketing and expect good returns; — You want to make an exciting and memorable first impression with your product; — You work in a highly competitive market where standing out is crucial for survival; — You operate in an industry that demands a high level of trust from users (finance, healthcare, investments, real estate); — You need to create custom designs tailored to your specific brand and market needs.

Consider creating a design system in case:

— You have an established business with multiple teams that need to work together; — Your product is set to grow quickly, and you want to minimize customer-related risks; — You have multiple digital products and want to ensure consistent behavior and development over time in a controllable manner; — You have someone on your team who can dedicate time to keeping the design system updated; — You want to decentralize decision-making and streamline customer-oriented processes with a consistent approach across your team; — You want to create custom designs that can adapt and scale as your product evolves.