Sprint Review 1 - September 29

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

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

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