Neuro-diversifying your design system
Rethinking systems thinking as a designer with ADHD
Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now, but I keep getting distracted
I have ADHD, primarily of the inattentive variety. Like many, I received a relatively late diagnosis in the early days of the pandemic—first from TikTok and then a “real” doctor who did absolutely no dancing or lip syncing.
One of the effects of my having ADHD is ideas need to percolate a while before they generate the pressure I need to focus on their execution. In fact, I’ve been writing this in my head for over six months.
At the time, I’d just left Stitch Fix, where I was a founding—and often lone—design lead for our design system, Mode.
I spent my final weeks at Stitch Fix in meetings and docs, trying to help the colleagues who would pick up the banner of our design system understand the ways a thousand seemingly isolated decisions tied back to both specific moments in time and broader schemes for Mode’s future.
Forced to articulate years’ worth of thought process with the new context of my ADHD diagnosis, I began to appreciate the many ways my neurodivergence has shaped my approach to design systems.
Design systems may not seem like an obvious first choice of work for someone with ADHD. System is right there in the name—implying organization, structure, and linear thinking.
My thinking is more like a conspiracy board covered in thread connecting pins and cryptic sticky notes. I see how everything is connected, but it’s more spider’s web than schematic.
This is what my office hours are like.
There is certainly a tension between design systems and the way my brain works; but I also suspect that’s why I’ve been successful.
When something doesn’t come naturally to you, you can end up building a stronger muscle for it than people who don’t have to sweat it as much. And you develop novel ways to compensate for the myriad challenges your design system will face (the way you’ve learned to compensate for your own lack of dopamine).
Maybe for that reason, I’m not the only ADHDer who’s gravitated toward design systems.
I won’t try to speak for all of us. Everyone’s experience with ADHD, design systems, and life is different. But I will share some things that I learned from my own.
Beware the illusion of organization.
Perhaps the hardest temptation to avoid as someone with ADHD in design systems is the allure of a superficial sense of order, imposed on your product by virtue of simply having a design system.
It’s easy to confuse the external trappings of a system with the clarity of thought, purpose, and execution they’re meant to drive.
You hear it when having a design system is framed as the solution to complex problems instead of a tool to bring solutions to life.
In the personal lives of people with ADHD, you can see this superficial sense of organization in DOOM piles. DOOM stands for Didn’t Organize, Only Moved.
When the clutter around you starts stressing you out, you pile it all up in a box and put it out of the way to deal with later. Your space is clean and things have been given “a place,” but your life isn’t really any more organized.
When something doesn’t come naturally to you, you can end up building a stronger muscle for it than people who don’t have to sweat it as much.
In the early days of Mode, we ended up creating our own design system DOOM piles. In our earliest libraries, we included both components that represented rigorous systems thinking and those predating the system that were “good enough to be better than further inconsistencies.”
Sure, they were all components we decided to standardize around, but we missed a meaningful difference—level of getting and strength of endorsement—that ended up causing confusion down the line.
DOOM piles aren’t all bad, though. ADHDers adopt them for a reason. They create space to focus on what you need to at the moment.
Having some intermediary space in which ideas can live before being fully integrated into or shut out from the system can help you avoid more impulsive decisions. What’s important is understanding the difference between your DOOMed issues and your finished solutions.
Object permanence: not as reliable as it sounds.
It’s also important, when you’re not able to solve a problem through your design system immediately, to remember it exists.
One reason DOOM piles are at best a stop-gap solution for people with ADHD is that as soon as something is filed away, we forget it’s there.
My own relationship with object permanence is notoriously spotty. I can be staring at my phone and also not able to find it. If I’m not staring at something? Forget it. My medication? I’m not familiar. My wallet? It never existed.
I don’t put things out of my mind, I throw them through the Everything Bagel from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (which is—among many brilliant things—a brilliant allegory for ADHD).
Just toss another deadline in there.
Design system teams need to prioritize everything they might do, just like any other. It’s normal to have to tell a stakeholder, “not now.” But if they have to keep reminding you their problem exists—and each time you act like it’s the first you’ve heard of it—that burns trust.
It’s not just your own object permanence you need to remember. Like a text message they’ve read and not replied to, your consumers will forget your design system exists if you don’t remind them every now and then.
Many design systems have thoughtfully written documentation full of answers teams rarely remember to seek there.
You may send out an email about every new component with a link to that documentation site, but most of your consumers are drowning in email. None of them are looking at their email while they’re trying to solve a problem in Figma or code.
Aligning the artifacts of your design system as closely to your team’s ways of working as possible is one way to keep it present in their mind. Communication is the other.
Over communicate, don’t infodump.
To keep the design system top of people’s mind you need to over communicate about it.
Other neurodivergent people reading this may be thinking, “Over communicate? Not. A. Problem.” To you I say: not so fast, Train Facts. There’s a difference between over communicating and infodumping.
One way ADHD disorders attention is by taking all the focus you should be putting elsewhere in life and dedicating it all to a new hyperfixation. You can gain an impressive amount of knowledge on a subject while also losing all sense of time and space. It’s great.
(Autistic people can experience something similar in the form of special interests.)
When you accidentally stumble into a conversation about ADHDer’s hyperfixation or an autistic person’s special interest, you get an infodump. Everything we’ve ever learned about that topic comes out of our mouth or keyboard at once because we’re so excited that it’s finally even tangentially relevant.
Not surprisingly, Design Systems can become their own hyperfixation that leads you down many fractal paths of hyperfixation. Grids, visual perception, the way Figma works, this framework or that.
You may find all that information not only fascinating but also helpful in doing your design systems work. But if the people using your design system also need to be experts in all those things? It kind of defeats the purpose.
It’s also important, when you’re not able to solve a problem through your design system immediately, to remember it exists.
Instead, we have to distill all of the thinking and learning we’ve done to the most essential take-aways and spread that education out over time instead of in one massive Slack or email.
We also have to look at how we’re communicating. Folks with ADHD know what it’s like to be overwhelmed with information in a format we can’t process. Nothing short circuits my brain like a spreadsheet, except for maybe a video that could have been a blog post.
People on your team also digest information differently. Over communicating sometimes means finding ways to communicate less at a time, in more varied ways.
Design systems require being able to thrive in chaos—not just create order.
Design systems are organic. They get expressed in pixels and code, but they’re made up of people. And the experiences we hope to systematize were made by still more people, usually over some length of time and with other aims than creating a neat UI kit. It gets messy.
That conspiracy board? In the early days of creating a design system from an existing product, you might consider yourself lucky if you can connect two pins confidently.
I’ve noticed I’m often much more comfortable in this phase than my peers without ADHD, and I thank the way I process information.
The distractibility that goes along with ADHD comes from sensitivity to stimuli. Being attuned to small signals you encounter day to day can create a seemingly intuitive grasp of how the pieces of a system work together.
If you find yourself struggling in the ambiguous phase of a new project, try focusing just a little less. Maybe your focus on reusable pieces is distracting you from something in the bigger picture. Or maybe the solution is lying just outside the clean lines you’ve drawn around your system.
Let your attention wander; you might be surprised by what you find.
Work with your brain, not against it.
I’ve learned it can be more efficient to diverge from my well-laid plans and follow what I find interesting in the moment. Very often, I am back on track faster and with more energy after those detours than if I fight to keep my focus on what I “should” be doing.
While developing strong habits to balance out ADHD can be beneficial, it’s also beneficial to work with your brain. For design systems pros, that means working with your team’s brains as well.
Too often, we think about “systems thinking” as a discipline to which our teams need to adhere; but what if instead we thought about it as a method of tapping into and scaling the thinking our teams are already doing?
I’m sure that’s a scary thought to those whose definition of systems thinking is defined—perhaps a little rigidly—by neurotypical standards.
What I’ve learned, though—through examining the way my own brain works—is that there are many ways to think about systems. And I think our systems will be stronger if they embrace more of them.
