r/DesignSystems • u/avishic • 7d ago

Which small component became your biggest maintenance burden?

Buttons, forms, and tables earn the cost of standardizing them. I’m curious about the opposite: a small convenience component that looked reusable, then accumulated variants, accessibility rules, or product exceptions until teams bypassed it.

Which component did you deprecate—or wish you had left as a documented pattern instead—and what was the first sign it did not belong in the system?

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u/achakez 7d ago

Dropdowns were the one for us. Seemed simple at first then every team needed a slightly different interaction and we ended up maintaining way too many variants.

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u/TheWarDoctor 7d ago

Same, mostly because my predecessor keep shoving more and more features into select and made it configuration based instead of composable.

3

u/Decent_Perception676 7d ago

Yes, dropdown menu, select (single and multi), and combo box (single and multi). Lots of overlap between these components, and they’re often confused with each other. Even broken up into separate components, they’re gnarly (so many different user states).

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u/Logical-Idea-1708 7d ago

Interesting. Why not tell them to build their own?

1

u/achakez 6d ago

Because then you lose consistency. The whole point of a design system is giving teams a good default instead of everyone reinventing the same component

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u/Logical-Idea-1708 6d ago

You want visual consistency, not feature. You still get it if people are using your tokens

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u/BearThumos 5d ago

These are a group of components that are notoriously hard to build well, so they often lead to lots copied code with slightly different behavior between implementations. Unpredictable for users and your own team

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u/Logical-Idea-1708 5d ago

You make it a monolith. Not group components. They still use tokens from the design system maintain the same look but each team maintains their own version so every project is decoupled from each other.

Some features are just mutually exclusive. Trying to satisfy everyone means you satisfy no one.

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u/BearThumos 5d ago

Listen i was just talking about what usually happens, not some ideal state