It's interesting that apparently it's mainly government services in the Anglosphere that use design systems.
An - admittedly cursory - search for non-Anglophone governments that promote the use of a design system only brought up the Swiss federal government: https://swiss.github.io/styleguide/en/
Both Finnish and Estonian authorities are said to be working on a styleguide but apart from a guide on the Estonian part that mainly focuses on Estonia as a brand there doesn't seem to be anything publicly available yet: https://brand.estonia.ee/design/
(I just didn't find it at first because I searched for something along the lines of "nederlands overheid" rather than the official term "rijksoverheid").
How many design guidelines do we need I wonder. Is the ideal scenario that every UN member comes up with a design system for their govt websites? I feel like this is somewhat wasteful.
It's probably (hopefully) wasteful in the same way that having multiple browsers, multiple web frameworks, even multiple programming languages is wasteful.
Sure, there is duplication of work, redundancy etc. But what you end up with is a much wider surface area to try different things, better things, copy ideas and combine good ideas in different ways.
On the contrary, if every country just pools ideas and selects the 'best' via a giant committee selection process, would you really expect that to produce a better result over the longer term? (Genuine question and I'm open to the answer being yes but I personally suspect not).
Wasteful perhaps, but I don't see governments giving up sovereignty over any part of their IT infrastructure, not matter how much anyone yells "slippery slope argument".
UN guidelines to ensure said infrastructure is available and accessible to a countries population would make sense though.
We use this for https://search.data.gov.au and have just survived the easiest accessibility audit I think I've ever been through. It's nice using a set of components that make your UI _more_ accessible rather than less, which has been my usual experience in the past.
Colour me surprised. I clicked on the link expecting the usual abomination that is an Australian Federal Government website that I usually deal with, but I was pleasantly surprised at the nice design and layout.
Now, if only we can extend this to our local state government...
The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) is the Australian government agency behind the Design System. Paul Shetler, the former CEO of the DTA, quit after a philosophical disagreement with the new minister. Shetler's company is now consulting with the NSW government on a lot of their digital transformation work, including their design system.
But seriously, I can only think of a handful of official things that use the "official" colours, lots of sports teams but not really used by the government.
Edit: Parent originally mentioned that the website doesn't use the "Official Australian Colours".
As an American living in Sydney, and working for an agency, I feel like accessibility is behind the US. This set of tools should help, but also the use of Lighthouse by QA teams is key.
With Lighthouse, any score below 90 on any metric means our work fails QA —- it’s in our contracts to exceed 90. As a result, our clients rave about how easy it was to pass accessibility and security audits. Only secret is Lighthouse, and other automated checks, as part of the build process.
The agency I work for is doing pretty extensive work to support JAWS 2018/2019, and NVDA. The problem we have is that a fix for a specific issue in JAWS may break NVDA (or cause double reads).
Making everything work nicely in our Single Page Apps is a nightmare.
If you try and make it work after the fact, yes. Nightmare.
If you know it's a target when you are in architecture, much easier to design it in a way that will pass the tests.
Not saying that it's always perfect, but generally speaking having tests is better than not. Just key to have the tests early and often, so you can fix issues before they get baked in throughout a complex system.
Cool, see my other comment as well -- for the agency I work for in Sydney, an 85 on Lighthouse would be a failing score. We need a 90 or higher on every metric to be able to hand it over to the client. Be useful to run a Lighthouse audit on your site and see what's causing the score to dip.
We have a lot of work to do for PWA's and performance. We have some issues open in the backlog however they will require some architectural changes and require a bit more time.
But why? Outside of a few big names (eg. Bootstrap), open-source CSS frameworks come and go on whim. This is CSS Framework that is also dependent on government funding, being supported by the very shallow Australia tech sector - no offense but working in Australia, many high quality developers are lured away from Australia to higher paying areas.
While this is neat, whats the guarantee this will be kept up to date over the next 1,2 or 5 years?
They're not pitching it as a design framework for others to use.
They're just showing the design framework they use internally. They guarantee they will keep it as up to date as they need it for as long as they need it as they own it and they're paying people to work on it.
I think that the purpose of a design system like this is the ability to create a uniform UI over various government agencies. Not to serve as a general purpose framework.
Last I checked the US Federal Government alone has a handful of thousand websites (not sure about Australia). If you added state, city etc governments, the number can easily run into five figures. It might be a good idea if they followed a standard set of UI/UX patterns and language. That said, the hard part is actually making them use the consistent standards
That menu at the top of this page is horrible at communicating where you are. There is just a small interrupted line at the bottom and a slightly different color that shows we are at 'Content page':
It would be great if some of the web sites like mygov or the ATO business portal used stuff like this instead of the brain dead frameworks they use now.
The business portal already has work underway to replace it. The Tax Agent portal has a replacement currently in beta. My gov itself doesn't have much content on it - or are you referring to ATOOnline ?
Bigger Australian government departments tend to roll our own components anyway - simply because we are all running on our own stacks with differing needs.
The department I work for still uses Knockout/Durandal for example.
So you should always play to the skills in your team, agreed. But in this case, it gives consistency across Government. If your Department/Agency is rolling their own components, why not add them back into the Design System for others to use? Less repeated effort, cheaper for the tax payer.
Right, so there's probably a discussion that needs to be had with your enterprise architecture team on why said stack was used (irrespective of skill sets available) when certain features are available "for free" (e.g. the DesignSystem)
I'll have a wild stab in the dark in saying that if the stack is really tightly coupled, that there's extra labour required by the dev team to meet the Digital Service Standard. Which is, really speaking, unnecessary public expenditure.
You are preaching to the choir here mate. Keep in mind we have over 60 developers, and over 100 single page applications under development/support.
The frameworks we are using have been in use here since 2014 (pre-dating the DesignSystem). It is not an easy matter to switch over to these components, especially considering the only framework supported is React.
As far as unnecessary public expenditure... I could probably write 1000 pages on it and not make a dent.
Perfect! I've just started watching Utopia, which was recommended in another HN article. The show makes me wonder what working for the Australian government is really like.
* 18F and USDS (USA): https://18f.gsa.gov/ and https://www.usds.gov/
* GSA Technology Transformation Service: https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/organization/federal-acquisitio...
* US Web Design System: https://v2.designsystem.digital.gov/
* Government Digital Service (UK): https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
* GOV.UK Design System: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/