Home Office Design Ops

I was asked to continue design system community work which had been ongoing for several months. I had prior experience in updating design systems, promoting usage, and encouraging community contributions. I took on this work alongside my full-time squad delivery role — unassisted and without direction — giving advice on how design is done and the importance of doing it right in a large government department.

In late 2021, as part of the design systems work, I facilitated two separate workshop exercises: a contribution blueprint and a pattern workshop. The contribution model session had around 40 people take part, and involved looking at a 'to be' version of a typical user journey of someone wishing to contribute a pattern or component to the Home Office design system — covering phases, people, tools and governance.

Building on the contribution model, I wanted an example to test the process — a design challenge everyone could relate to. I chose search, as it came up repeatedly as a pattern people needed help and guidance with. I invited everyone to a remote, Mural-based workshop to discuss search examples from services, common problems and solutions, useful guidance for teams starting over, and what an MVP of guidance might look like.

With priorities for the search pattern established, I gathered the fundamental requirements for the community — covering fuzzy searching, when to use search over another pattern, technical constraints, narrowing and filtering, and 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 on content and accessibility for the published guidance. The result after several months of iteration was published guidance for search for something on the Home Office design system.

I also left behind a version of the Home Office prototype kit, based on the GOV.UK kit, for use by the community — with the hope it would be built upon by other designers and hosted on the Home Office GitHub repository as an additional resource.