Advantages of Using Both Component-based Design & Content

Enhancing Agility, Efficiency, and Consistency of Modern Customer Experiences

In the fast-paced digital landscape, enterprises seek innovative approaches to deliver dynamic and engaging customer experiences. A collaborative, component-based approach ensures that your content and design are reusable, easily manageable, and scalable across different channels. By breaking content into modular components, teams can unlock numerous advantages that transcend traditional fixed page-based processes.

Content and design components are the basis of “composable” customer experiences that can be built on the fly much faster, and at a lower cost, than fixed page-based processes. 

Here are some of the key reasons enterprise teams are working towards component-based design and content:

1. Consistent Branding and User Experience: Modular development ensures a uniform brand identity and cohesive user experience throughout your digital properties.
2. Faster Development and Enhanced Productivity: Breaking content into reusable modules allows for parallel development and accelerates time-to-market, boosting productivity.
3. Improved Scalability and Flexibility: Modular development enables easy addition or removal of components and facilitates easy training for content designers and authors, and user interface designers, accommodating growth and adapting to changing requirements.
4. Enhanced Content Reusability: Developing reusable components reduces duplication efforts, reduces copy and paste and manual content administration, lowers maintenance costs, and ensures consistent messaging across platforms.
5. Streamlined Maintenance and Updates: Isolated components simplify content and design maintenance tasks and enable swift updates without impacting the entire system.
6. Seamless Collaboration and Teamwork: Clear interfaces and well-defined components foster effective collaboration between marketing professionals, designers, and developers.
7. Future-Proofing and Technological Adaptability: Modular development separates content from presentation and underlying technologies, facilitating seamless migration and adaptation to new systems or emerging technologies.

It makes it easier to maintain and update content as changes can be made in a single place and reflected across all experiences. Additionally, the modular content approach reduces development time and costs, allowing for more efficient content creation and delivery.

Another advantage of the modular content approach is that it enables content to be built, or directly mapped, natively inside a content system that can assemble and deliver experiences to customers seamlessly. This reduces maintenance costs and manual effort.

The Schematica RealContent Plugin for Figma offers one path to integrating content and design components into a single process in Figma. For more information, visit schematica.io 

Research and Survey Results from the Design Community

In a recent study [A] conducted to explore content design, some interesting findings emerged regarding the use of Figma. The study surveyed individuals from various organizations, with over 80% of respondents using Figma daily. 

What stood out was the collaborative process of getting content into Figma, with designers often taking on the initial responsibility of incorporating content into the design file. However, the research also revealed that Figma users encountered several content management and review challenges, such as confusion over who should review the content and difficulty identifying the "source of truth" for specific snippets.

This is where the modular content approach becomes essential. By organizing content into modular components, teams can ensure that content is consistent, reusable, and easy to manage. Here are some key advantages of using a modular content approach in Figma:

1. Consistency: Modular content allows designers and content creators to maintain a consistent user experience across various platforms and devices. By reusing standardized content components, teams can ensure that the messaging and branding remain cohesive throughout the design.
2. Efficiency: With modular content, teams can save time by reusing content components instead of creating them from scratch for every new design. This approach streamlines the content creation process, enabling teams to focus on refining and improving existing components rather than starting from square one.
3. Collaboration: Modular content fosters collaboration among team members. With clearly defined content components, it becomes easier for different stakeholders, such as designers, writers, and reviewers, to contribute and provide feedback. This collaborative approach ensures that content is reviewed and refined efficiently, resulting in higher-quality outputs.

Discover the Potential of Figma Content Design: Research Findings

1. Collaborating on content design is a must-have, yet flexible process that varies among organizations. Typically, designers lead the initial content injection into Figma design files.
2. While design systems are popular, finding additional tools beyond Figma presents obstacles in addressing content-related issues.
3. Budgets and team sizes pose hurdles to implementing new solutions. Most respondents don't use external tools to manage their content in Figma. Is this because Figma's audience is underserved in content management, or are there simply no plugins tailored to their needs?
4. Copying and pasting content from Figma is the norm for most respondents, but it's time-consuming and error-prone.
5. Figma users encounter difficulties when it comes to managing and reviewing content. Some of the problems they face include disagreements about who should evaluate the content, limited commenting capabilities, and challenges in determining the most reliable sources of information and maintaining accessibility standards.

Crafting exceptional content is a multifaceted and rewarding endeavor.  To make the process smoother, more efficient, and yield better quality work, it’s essential to understand how you can optimize your content creation workflow. That’s why we encourage you to explore the “Insights and Trends from Figma Content Design'' survey--it provides first hand insights from experienced content designers that can inform your approach and help you create a compelling customer experience. By gaining a deeper understanding of the current trends shaping content creation, you'll be empowered to refine your workflow and achieve outstanding results.