Interview questions in Design Systems, page 6
Measuring design system adoption and health
Component coverage and version spread from code scans, usage analytics, issue and satisfaction signals.
Gradual design system adoption in legacy code
Coexistence strategy, codemods for mechanical swaps, lint rules to block regressions, prioritize high-traffic surfaces.
Linking form-component adoption to fewer a11y bugs
Define both variables, segment by adoption level, control confounders, watch correlation-versus-causation.
Measuring designer efficiency from Figma data
Library component usage and detach rates from Figma, time-to-mockup, override frequency via the API.
End-to-end process for a Modal props API break
Justify and design the change, additive rollout with deprecation, major release plus codemod, comms and adoption tracking.
Design tokens for multi-brand button theming
Tokens as named design decisions, primitive-versus-semantic layers, per-brand themes mapping semantic to primitive.
Documentation for a new Card component
Usage guidance and do/don't, variants, accessibility, code examples, composition.
Framework-agnostic components across React, Vue, Angular
Web components for one core, framework wrappers for ergonomics, codegen as an alternative, with their costs.
A simple automatable metric for dev-time savings
Component coverage or cycle time, gathered automatically, compared across adoption levels.
Structuring color tokens for a new app
Primitive palette, semantic role tokens, optional component tokens, theming benefit.
Explain token aliasing in design systems
Primitives hold raw values, semantic tokens reference them by intent, components consume only semantic ones.
Designing a flexible yet usable DataTable API
Sensible defaults, compound or slot-based composition for flexibility, props for common cases.
Architecting decoupled but linked Tabs components
A Tabs context provider holds active state, TabList and TabPanel consume it anywhere inside the provider.
Versioned documentation site for a design system
Snapshot docs per release, version-prefixed routes, a version switcher, canonical latest.
Deprecating a widely used component gracefully
Announce and document replacement, soft-deprecate with runtime and type warnings, ship codemods, remove only in a later major.
Centralized vs federated design system team models
Centralized gives consistency and quality but bottlenecks; federated scales contribution but risks fragmentation; many teams use a hybrid with central governance.
Repo and versioning strategy for multi-platform DS
Shared platform-agnostic tokens as source of truth, per-platform packages, independent semver, a monorepo with workspaces.
Tracking design system health across the org
Static AST scanning for component imports and props, lint or detect-one-offs, parse package manifests for version drift, aggregate into a dashboard.
Challenges of a federated contribution model
Federation scales velocity but needs governance, RFCs, contribution guidelines, automated quality gates, and core review.
Governance for a multi-brand design system
Brand-agnostic core consuming semantic tokens, per-brand token themes, contribution rules blocking brand conditionals in core.
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