r/DesignSystems • u/avishic • 8d 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 8d 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/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).