Build highly customizable design systems with headless UI components

As a startup when we build any UI interface we use UI libraries like MUI, Bootstrap, etc. and they are very helpful to fasten the development. However, It works fine until the MVP stage when faster implementation is the top priority and customization is the secondary priority.

When the design and customizations start to grow, these UI libraries do not meet the demand for customization. A lot of time is spent hacking all the needs around MUI components while managing to do so, and it feels dirty and complicated. It becomes very difficult to maintain and scale in the future.

At some point when these UI libraries fail to provide the needs of growing products. Teams start building custom components from scratch. Soon they realize it’s not easy to build highly accessible and customizable components. It takes months and months to build and test components for browser compatibility with the keyboard and native events handling. all this while fixing all the issues along the way.

Is there any better way of building a reliable yet customizable design system?

To solve all these issues, we need a Highly Customizable Design System that fulfills the following requirements.

1. Customizing the design and functionality as per brand requirements is one of the top priorities.
2. Separation of Concerns: Decoupled visual interface from logic and functionality.
3. Configurable Theming: Easily configurable theming from one central config.
4. Accessibility and browser support: UI should be accessible and support all necessary browsers while providing UI customization.
5. Maintainability: Separating concerns between the visual interface and complex functionality should make it more maintainable.
6. Composability and Scalability: UI components should be composable with high cohesion for building atomic components, which provides scalability.

Yes. Headless UI components fulfill all the requirements for a highly customizable design system. Headless user interface components separate the logic & behavior of a component from its visual representation. This pattern works great when the logic of a component is sufficiently complex and decoupled from its visual representation. These components are battle tested for functionality, browser compatibility, native event handling, etc.

The hardest parts of building complex UIs revolve around the state, events, side effects, and data computation/management. By removing these concerns from the markup, styles, and implementation details, our logic and components can be more modular and reusable. Headless UI components provide an abstraction over the functionality and internals of the components so that you can focus on the visual aspects of the UI.

‍Headless UI is a term for libraries and utilities that provide the logic, state, processing, and API for UI elements and interactions but do not provide markup, styles, or pre-built implementations.

In a world where design systems and user interface libraries are headless, your interfaces can have a high-end custom feel and the durability & accessibility of a great open-source library. You spend time implementing the only part you need, the truly unique part, the look and feel specific to your application.

How to build Headless UI Components?

How do Headless UI components achieve this decoupling of Functionality and Visual representation?

1. Render Props/Higher Order Components is a very common way of abstracting a reusable part of functionality while providing a way of customizing UI.

As shown in the example, the Headless UI component Probability provides functionality and logic part and while visual representation is completely customizable based on need

2. Provide Hooks to expose common functionality of the component

React Hooks are great at improving code reusability and reducing code duplication while building reactJS components. As shown in the example below the functionality of Combobox has been extracted into a react hook and can be used in any UI component you wish to build for Combobox. providing you full flexibility on visual aspects of the component while maintaining the functionality of a Combobox

3. Provide Hooks to expose commonly used functionality of the component

UI components should accept CSS styles as high-level props and then use them internally based on HTML markup. This opens up all the possibilities for ultimate customizations using custom CSS to style the components by passing styles as props or just adding styles to CSS class names specified by markup. It can be used to create Design themes using CSS classes instead of just a few theme variables in existing UI component libraries.

Additional Benefits of Headless UI components:

1. Reduced Bundle Size: They also do a very good job of reducing the bundle size by importing very specific functionality of the component without importing unnecessary styling.
2. Works with your styling solution: Headless components will work well with any styling solution. If you’re into Tailwind CSS, use their classes on the markup. CSS-In-JS or any styling solution you might be using, you can use it with headless components, and you don’t have to use custom styling provided by other UI libraries.

Headless UI components fulfill all the requirements for a highly customizable design system using the above feature.

- Here’s the list of Popular Headless Component Libraries

1. Headless UI
2. Downshift
3. Reach UI
4. Radix UI

Along with these libraries, you can use any headless UI components available on GitHub/Internet, and they will work seamlessly. React Table is an excellent example of a Headless UI Component. The same concepts can be used to build design systems with other UI frameworks than Reactjs.

Conclusion

If you’re building a design system for a growing startup, then you might get tempted to build all the components yourself to command over customizability. but it's not that simple. Accessibility and browser support can be very challenging. Instead, build your highly customizable design system on top of Headless UI Components and build reliable products in time.

Our Product Engineering team has expertise in building Highly Customizable Design Systems and has helped many companies build their product and brands. Let’s get in touch if your company is building something cool and needs a design system that can support all growing requirements.

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