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Design System Working Group (DSWG)

Henry Cookson edited this page Jan 24, 2022 · 12 revisions

An update on the Design System Working Group

The service manual team will be running a reduced service until at least early April 2022. This is so that team members can support other services such as the national booking service for vaccinations. This means the Design System Working Group will be paused for now.


What the group is

A community group that meets every month or, when there are enough well-formed proposals (decided by the service manual team to require a session).

At group sessions, members discuss and vote on which community proposals to publish in the design system.

Who forms the group

A mix of user-centred design professionals from multiple teams and organisations that make up the NHS as well as other healthcare organisations.

The members of the group rotate every 6 months but everyone has the opportunity to stay involved.

Get involved

If you are part of the group already, join the #design-system-working-group channel on the public NHS service manual Slack workspace, join in and start discussions.

If you are not part of the group but want to join, get in touch with the service manual team.

Next session

The Design System Working Group has been paused for now.

Previous sessions

Proposals, discussion points, votes and next steps from previous group sessions.

December 2021

Host: Henry Cookson

December 2021 slides used during the session.

Key contributor: Ben Cullimore

Discussion points:

  • Needs qualitative evidence to proceed
  • Be clear why vanity URLs and full URLs are different use cases (camel and non camel case), which is why they have distinct guidance
  • Are there any hosting constraints that NHS services may face when following this guidance? Michael Cheung mentioned certain operating systems of servers may prevent certain URL formats to be created
  • RNIB on Twitter shared some guidance on camel case being a good format for screen readers
  • General rule for new guidance added to the service manual is that we don't apply things retrospectively so no need for teams to adjust URLs unless doing new work

Votes:

  • 5 - Ready to publish now
  • 9 - Needs a little more work
  • 0 - Needs a lot more work
  • 0 - Not right now

Next steps:

  • Service manual team to investigate what tech stacks a range of NHS services use to see if there are any technical constraints that would prevent services following the drafted URL guidance
  • Service manual team to prototype the guidance within the service manual so a visualisation can be presented at the next DSWG session

Key contributors: Sam Saw, Sara Wilcox, Daniel Johnston

Discussion points:

  • Consider whether the guidance is applicable for clinical facing systems
  • Alignment of components should be a new backlog item, but guidance for left-aligning text seems good to publish
  • Consider where this guidance could also be surfaced in the accessibility guidance section of the service manual
  • Include guidance to not use justified text unless user research shows it would be useful for a particular service

Votes:

  • 12 - Ready to publish now
  • 5 - Needs a little more work
  • 0 - Needs a lot more work
  • 0 - Not right now

Next steps:

  • Re-name this issue to only focus on text-alignment, not left-alignment for other non-text content types
  • Create a new issue to explore alignment guidance for other components and patterns
  • Iterate the guidance based on discussion points
  • Service manual team to create PR in nhsuk-frontend to add left, centre and right text-alignment utility classes

October 2021

Host: Karl Goldstraw

October 2021 slides used during the session.