Sprint Review 1 - September 29

GC Design System Product Team

L’équipe de produits du système de conception du GC

Product:

Product vision, mission + high level objectives progress overview

• The product team worked to define a shared vision and mission for the design system:

Vision

• For public servants who need to meet evolving digital service delivery standards and the public's expectations, the GC Design System is a solid foundation that increases the quality and efficiency of their work, enables them to build services that are inclusive and provides a framework to ensure reliable task success.

Mission

• Driven by modern design, standards and technology best practices, the GC Design System is informed by data and focused on the needs of people. It helps teams deliver a cohesive, accessible and trusted Government of Canada experience.
• Next steps - the team is now working to define:
  • what a GC Design system is
  • problems we’re trying to solve
  • objectives
  • key results

User journey mapping

• We created user journey maps based on user interviews for 2 groups : fearless innovators vs loyal implementers
• Journeys included phases of the journey, the situation the user finds themselves in or actions they’ve taken, the mood, feelings and needs, tools needed and community building
• We will use these journeys to plan the ideal user journey for our design system

Governance:

Findings from the analytics and user feedback on design.canada.ca

• Presentation: Canada.ca design system - analytics and feedback
  • Web analytics (January 1st - Sept 15) and feedback tool (added in June 2021)

Highlights:

• Content Style Guide gets the most traffic
• Templates getting more views than components
• Little traffic to French pages (5-10% for most pages)
• Mobile use is low (10-15%)

Key takeaways:

• Canada.ca design system is mostly used by people from web comms community
• Web comms community is still looking for guidance: templates, guidance on which component to use, clarification
• Hypothesis:
  • This is not where developers are generally coming, so we need to understand their needs better if we want to address them

Guidance:

• Presentation: GC Design system comparative analysis
• Compared 23 design systems based on:
  • Navigation
  • Inclusion of content guidance
  • Visual foundations guidance
  • Component guidance
  • Versioning and history of components

Highlights:

• All of them have navigation between elements within a section
  • 11/23 have both top and left navigation
• Takeaways:
  • Navigation: Making the design system a separate product, with internal navigation, is the common practice
  • Content guidance: The “overarching”, non-component-specific guidance from the Canada.ca Content Style Guide should be in a separate section, within the design system
  • Visual foundations guidance: The design system needs a separate “Foundations” section for core visual and brand elements
  • Component guidance: Component guidance should have some content guidance specific to that component. There are many ways to present guidance for developers and designers. Having 2 separate tabs is an option, but not the only option.
  • Component history and versioning: There is an opportunity to figure out the best way of conveying changes, versioning, how to upgrade

• Guidance for users revolves around four sections:
  • awareness of the digital policy framework
  • design system guidance
  • navigating and using the design system
  • selecting and applying the right tokens and components for the job

• Tackling the design system guidance:
  • We did an inventory of existing guidance for review and analysis
  • We found that there is a lot to consume between WET, Canada.ca style guide, policies, etc.

Next steps:

• Understand how design decisions are captured at a process level with the goal being to make the design system the trusted source of truth for design system decisions
• Align the product team regarding standards, values, speaking a common language
• Clarify the different meanings of guidance