Let’s say you have 50 components in your design system, 25 of which have been adopted by feature teams at your organization. You could say that 50% of your design system has been adopted.

What if you removed 10 of the non-adopted components from your design system? Now, 25 components have been adopted from your 40-component design system, making it so that your design system has been 62.5% adopted. To point a finer point on it, in this scenario, removing 10 components increases your design system’s adoption ratio by 12.5%.

Extrapolate this idea further by removing all components that aren’t adopted. Now, 100% of your design system has been adopted.

Wait: are we just gaming the numbers to make it look like our design system is more adopted than it really is? If you do it this way: yes. (Personally, I see nothing wrong with that, but perhaps that’s a topic for another time.)

But the sequence matters.

Think about the way most design systems get made. A group of designers and engineers make a handful of foundational elements (e.g. buttons, cards, headers, tables, footers, etc) and release them as the initial “design system.” At this point, this is a few dozen components that aren’t adopted at all; i.e. the design system has been 0% adopted. Then they start the hard work of trying to getting teams to use their components. This is the leading culprit of design system ghost towns and graveyards: loads of great components that aren’t adopted.

But what if you set a criteria from the start that, in order for a component to be added to the design system, it must already be adopted by at least 1 or more teams? That's a prerequisite. That would mean that every component in the design system would be adopted, and your design system would always be 100% adopted at any given time.

How can a team adopt a component if it’s not in the design system already? Create a separate place—a code repository, a sandbox, a Figma library—that you call something like alpha or prerelease. This place can act as a working, evolving playground where the design system team can experiment and feature teams can try before they buy. It’s a great place to collaborate with pilot teams.

Once enough teams adopt a component, graduate it into the official design system. That’s one of the fastest ways to create a design system that has been 100% adopted.