right now this reasoning is based on paradigms that are not verbalized for the most part. It is the result of intuition and the discourse with customers. This strategy will avoid regressions and catastrophes like the loss of a customer for the most part. But it has its limits. There is no clear scale against which progress can be measured. So pragmatic KPIs like “How many users complained about / praised the change?” and “did it achieve secondary goals like improved performance etc?” will decide if a change was a success or not.
The issue is: potential users and potential customers cant complain.
A user interface is like a language. Our ability to understand this language is influenced by the culture we got socialized in. If we don’t verbalize the underlying paradigms we employ while creating these user interfaces we will embed our culture into these systems. This means that they are easy to use for people like us but not necessarily in general.
Benefits a design system might bring from an abstract perspective:
Consistent appearance and interaction, maintaining a familiarity to the user, can reduce the difficulty of learning, cognitive and operating costs, and improve work efficiency.
source
By having clearly defined categories of user interface components this confusion between “data display” components and a user action (for which a button might be used for example) would not have happened. If there was a page like this where all the different UI components and their purpose was listed a rational discussion could be had. It would also be good if these discussions would be held in public and weren’t just communicated through git commit messages.