Before we begin…

Let’s define the attributes of high-quality design system documentation (referred to as docs). To me, it’s a mix of usability, accessibility, effectiveness, clarity and aesthetics.

I’ve seen plenty of docs that look amazing but lack substance or good navigation. Great docs should be accessible (readable, responsive, and inclusive) and super effective at delivering the right info fast.

How you can measure the quality of each attribute:

• Usability: User test information architecture and general UX

• Accessibility: Audit against WCAG guidelines with these tools (and user test)

• Clarity: Use the Flesch Reading Ease or Gunning Fog Index

• Effectiveness: Use a single-question feedback survey

• Aesthetic: If your docs look great, people will tell you!

Now, let’s dive into ways to level up your docs…

1. Ensure you have clear user needs

2. Provide comprehensive component content

3. Invest in visual appeal

4. Include dedicated accessibility guidelines per com …

5. Add more contextual examples in both design and do …

Ensure you have clear user needs

I asked my colleague Julian Fleetwood (Jools) what makes high-quality design system documentation. He’s our Lead Content Strategist for the Atlassian Design System (ADS) and is currently working on a new docs site for us:

This goes beyond “I need to use a button component”. Documentation isn’t just about how good it looks, its about how quickly and easily someone can find the content they need. To do this you need to identify user needs and a journey.

🎯 What you can do

Create your user needs: this can be done from standard user interviews synthesised into user needs. I’ve found Dovetail is quite effective for this. See below for what an example of a user need can look like:

Provide comprehensive component content

If your docs don’t have the info users need, they’ll never find them useful. I chatted with Victor Zanivan @ MUI about what truly makes docs high-quality:

Victor makes a great point—docs often focus on what a component has, but not how it works or why it exists. Adding this context helps users better understand the component and feel confident they’re using it correctly.

🎯 What you can do

Check you have the following in your documentation for each component:

• What: Props, states, links to design files

• How: Usage, best practice, behaviors, flows, examples, accessibility

• Why: Problem statement, link to behind-the-scenes blog, component intro

Any missing? work with your team to get them in. Use Component Gallery to compare other design system docs approaches too.

Invest in visual appeal

Ever heard of the Aesthetic-Usability Effect? It’s the idea that people are more forgiving of small usability flaws when something looks great—basically, if it’s pretty, it feels easier to use.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can skip on usability, but it’s a powerful way to elevate your docs. Sure, getting roadmap time for fun stuff like animations and illustrations can be tricky, but when done right, it’s so worth it.

As an example, lets take inspiration adjacent to design systems from Dropbox’s brand guidelines. They didn’t have to make a scrollable, animated menu, but they did—and it’s such a cool touch! It makes me trust their docs are top-notch before I even dig in.

Great-looking docs boost your external image too. Public docs often get noticed—like eBay’s recent release of their playbook (see below), it’s been buzzing on LinkedIn!

I spoke to eBay’s Design System (Evo) Product Designer Wesley Anderson, here’s what he had to say:

🎯 What you can do

Run this exercise: The 10-star experience by Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, it will open up a blue-sky vision that can be used to sell to your team.

Include dedicated accessibility guidelines per component

Accessibility was on my 2025 radar, but there’s still work to do. I audited Button across 15 popular docs sites—only Pinterest and IBM mentioned accessibility. Without clear accessibility guidance, designers and engineers are left to figure it out themselves.

Adding an accessibility tab or section for each component will boost your docs and raise accessibility standards across your org. For example, Atlassian’s Button docs cover common pitfalls like disabled states or tooltips, making it easier to build accessible designs.

🎯 What you can do

Find out components in need of accessibility guidance: Run polls, surveys, look at help requests, audit code - whatever you can get your hands on to better understand opportunities for dedicated guidance.

Add more contextual examples in both design and docs

As humans, we crave context to understand things better. When my team updated our design system Figma library, we added sticker-sheets showing common component prop configurations (see below).

Designers loved using them in specs, but we noticed a gap—engineers inspecting the stickers at build time had to figure out the setup themselves. We didn’t have coded stickers available, leading to extra work and translation on the engineering side.

🎯 What you can do

Ensure all examples exist in both design and code. When designers use real examples, having pre-built code ready to go makes handoff and production much smoother.

• Good: Add a link in Figma to your sticker to the coded example via documentation links

• Great: Connect a component in Figma to its code using Code connect, so when an engineer inspects in Dev mode, the exact code is there - bypassing docs

Ryan from Glass Door also touches on something I don’t see often with examples:

As someone that codes, I see docs without examples of how to use certain props all the time and it can sometimes be tricky figuring it out. Make sure you include an example for every API prop in both Figma and code per component so a person can understand its use fully.

Final thoughts: Design documentation to be redundant

You don’t want a staff member to constantly have to refer to a token or component API every time they use the system, context switching between tools will be inefficient.

Instead build knowledge and confidence for a designer and engineer to become an expert. That way your docs will be so intuitive that it is hardly used once learned - that’s the end goal.

🤙 Any feedback is much appreciated