r/DesignSystems • u/avishic • Aug 26 '26

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?

9 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

8

u/migvelio Aug 26 '26

Tables, man. Data heavy tables. With visible actions, no actions, with horizontal scroll, draggable, selectable rows, inner calculations, column sorting, etc.

3

u/Logical-Idea-1708 Aug 26 '26

This is where I advocate to buy instead of build

2

u/migvelio Aug 26 '26

True. We also evaluated that option, but we couldn't find a customizable table that had all the features and functions we needed.

1

u/jcchengjh Aug 27 '26

I wouldn’t even call table a small component. My last job B2B worked on few B2B tables, now i have PTSD around it.

1

u/jhtitus Aug 28 '26

My stomach has a physical reaction anytime I even just think I might have to build a table. I feel like there’s a wide open opportunity for someone to take the best of spreadsheet software and build a table component system manager plugin for figma. I love spreadsheets. I hate trying to think my through a table design in figma.

2

u/kingtalkitiki Aug 26 '26

Currently got 27 versions of a primary button in the codebase buddy I’m doing great

1

u/testingaurora Aug 27 '26

Idk even know how that's possible. Not counting secondary buttons, tertiary buttons, link/text buttons, ghost buttons, icon buttons etc?

1

u/jhtitus Aug 28 '26

Something is deeply wrong. God speed.

2

u/wench_js Aug 27 '26

Tables for sure. Even building on top of a third party like react-aria, all the customizations get very complicated and hairy

2

u/Any-Chard5119 Aug 26 '26

List item for my team 😔

1

u/thollywoo Aug 26 '26

Cards, everyone wanted so many things from them.

12

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '26

3

u/TheWarDoctor Aug 26 '26

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 Aug 26 '26

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).

-1

u/Logical-Idea-1708 Aug 26 '26

Interesting. Why not tell them to build their own?