The charming and masterful Ethan Marcotte emphasizes the importance of crafting design systems to fit the way an organization works and behaves:
To put a finer point on it, a pattern library’s value to an organization is tied directly to how much—and how easily—it’s used. That’s why I usually start by talking with clients about the intended audiences for their pattern library. Doing so helps us better understand who’ll access the pattern library, why they’ll do so, and how we can design those points of contact.
While a basic pattern library might consist simply of a collection of components, an essential pattern library is presented in a way that makes it not just the “right” thing to use but the easiest. For what it’s worth, this is really hard to do well; as we’ve found in our own projects, there’s some seriously demanding UX/research work behind tailoring a design system to the people who use it.
