As our product grows and the design system and its tokens grow, we are finding ourselves in a position where the choice of variable is often not clear-cut. The management of a vast array of similar variables slows down our workflow and often ends up with the wrong variable being used and referenced in code.
Part of this might be due to the tokens getting out of hand but it would be really great if there was a way of identifying the usage of variables to see which ones don’t get used that often and which ones are never used. This way we could merge variables, delete them, etc. Going a step further, being able to scope to components or files where certain variables are used would be helpful too.
I know there is a design system analytics feature in the organization tier that we will soon be upgrading to when dev mode comes out of beta but I don’t know if this already exists in some form there.
I fully agree that we need analytics for variables.
Figma users are now converting from variants to variables to handle different modes and themes. In the past, we were able to make big design decisions that were informed by how often a variant was inserted and where. Now, since variables have reduced the need for variants, we cannot see the analytics for a variable or mode. This drastically reduces our ability to make informed design decisions for our design system.
Figma needs to implement this. Otherwise variables become a downgrade from variants in this regard.