Your 47-Page Design System Docs? Nobody's Reading Them

You spent three months documenting every component in your design system. Usage guidelines, do's and don'ts, code examples, accessibility notes, design rationale. Forty-seven pages of comprehensive documentation.

Engineers open it once, can't find what they need in 30 seconds, and build their own version of the button instead.

This is the documentation paradox. The more complete you make it, the less useful it becomes. You're optimizing for coverage when you should be optimizing for speed to answer.

Video game tutorials figured this out decades ago. The bad ones front-load everything - here's how to move, jump, attack, defend, use items, manage inventory, all before you've played a single minute. Everyone skips through it, then gets stuck five minutes later asking "wait, how do I jump?"

The good tutorials teach you one thing right when you need it. You need to move? Here's a movement. Now you need to jump? Here's a jump. Just-in-time learning that doesn't overwhelm.

Your component docs should work the same way. When someone searches "button," they shouldn't land on a 3,000-word essay about button philosophy. They should see which button to use for their case in under 15 seconds, with a code snippet they can copy immediately.

Save the comprehensive stuff for a separate section that three people per year will read. Everyone else just needs to ship.