Home Office Design Ops
Helping to build design system standards across Home Office DDaT
Situation
I was asked continue the design system community work which had been ongoing for several months so was quite new. I had experience in updating design systems, promoting usage, and encouring contributions by the community. I would take on this work alongside my fulltime day to day squad delivery work, unassisted, and without direction.
Task
I would also be giving advice on how design is done and the importance of doing it right in a large government department. I continued to be a helpful voice in the community by providing advice to those new to the Home Office prototyping kit.
Some time after, in late 2021,as part of the design systems work, I facilitated 2 seperate workshop exercises:
- Contribution blueprint
- Pattern workshop
The contribution model session had around 40 people take part, and involved looking at a 'to be' version of a what might be a typical user journey of somone wishing to contribute a pattern or component to the Home Office design system. Together we looked at phases, people, tools and governance.
Action
Building on the contribution model, I wanted an example to use which would test the process, a nitty gritty design challenge everyone could relate to; I chose 'search', as this seemed to come up time after time as a pattern people needed help and guidance with. I then invited everyone to a remote, Mural based workshop, where we would discuss:
- Search examples from a service, with screenshots
- Common search based problems and solutions
- What guidance would be useful for those teams starting over
- What an MVP of guidance might look like
Result
With some priorities for the search pattern now firmly established, I set to work, gathering the fundamental basic requirements for the community.
These were:
- Fuzzy searching
- When to use search over another pattern
- Technical constraints
- Narrowing down / filtering
- Exact matches
I created a linked backlog item in the design system where people can discuss the pattern for future iterations, and worked with Marion and Guerman, to help with content and accessibility on the guidance to be published. The result after several months of iteration and was published guidancence for search for something
I also, in January 2022,I left behind a version of the Home Office prototype kit, based on the GOVUK kit, for use by the community. My hope is, this can be built upon by other designers and eventually hosted on the Home Office Github repository as an addition resource.
