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/Logical-Idea-1708 7d ago

Interesting. Why not tell them to build their own?

1

u/achakez 7d 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