How to Measure Design System Health
Design systems need measurement to improve. Without metrics, you can't demonstrate ROI, prioritize work, or know if quality is improving or degrading. But what should you measure, and how?
Why This Is Challenging
- No built-in analytics in Figma for design system usage
- Stakeholders ask for ROI data you can't provide
- Hard to prioritize system improvements without usage data
- Quality improvements are invisible without tracking
Building a Manual Health Dashboard
- 1Define your health metrics: adoption rate, detached instances, token violations, component coverage
- 2Create a spreadsheet to track metrics over time
- 3Schedule regular audit sessions (weekly or bi-weekly)
- 4During each audit, count instances of each metric across key files
- 5Calculate percentages: (components from library / total components) × 100
- 6Graph trends over time to show progress
- 7Present findings to stakeholders monthly
- 8Adjust system priorities based on metric insights
Real-Time Health Monitoring with ComponentQA
ComponentQA calculates a weighted health score automatically, tracking all the metrics that matter. Get real-time visibility into design system quality without manual data collection.
- Health score updates automatically with each scan
- Severity-weighted scoring prioritizes critical issues
- Historical trends show improvement over time
- Stakeholder-ready dashboards without manual prep
- Alerts when health drops below configured thresholds