All of this has created a ‘mental model’ for your customers – they expect to find things in a certain way, move their fingers and arms in a certain manner, and perform actions in a pre-determined manner. This brings us to the concept of a design system – a set of components and patterns that define the entire experience of your product.
You want to ensure that your design system has enough individuality, while still being a synthetic part of the whole. No customer will want to switch mental models, especially not just for your product. We need to be sensitive to the limits of ‘human cognitive workload’ and build accordingly (think Effective User Research).
For instance, one of our customers in the smart building wanted all their enterprise UI screens designed using Microsoft's fluent design system. Come to think of it, this makes sense. If an enterprise is comfortable in the Microsoft ecosystem, it is only natural that they would want all their applications to have a similar look and feel. Not having to give a second thought to how controls and interaction elements would ultimately work in an application will only save time for employees and have a positive impact on the bottom line.
