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USWDS: The United States Web Design System

designsystem.digital.gov

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Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#31

Post by fuzzy2 »

evan_ wrote: post #29
kingcharles wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your pithy comment? :) I'm genuinely interested.

Consider an icon font where "E" is a little "edit" pencil- to a screen reader it just looks like an "E". Of course you could just put `aria-label="edit"` on its container the same way you would an SVG. The icon font is also a problem if the font doesn't load and the browser uses a fallback, now you have a weird "E" in the middle of your document. They're harder to get aligned just right in my experience as well. Some…

I would expect modern icon fonts to exclusively use the Unicode Private Use Area. Fallback fonts would then not have glyphs for these code points. Screen readers would hopefully ignore them.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#32

Post by systemvoltage »

guilhermeasg wrote: post #7

I haven't used them myself, but the GOV.UK components look and function great. https://govuk-components.netlify.app/

I am not a fan of Gov UK framework. For once, the banner takes up 50% of the space on my mobile browser.

All design elements and controls are excessively large and bloated. Negative space is liberally applied everywhere.

USWDS strikes a good balance.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#33

Post by haltcase »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #20
deltarholamda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government agencies love making standards. It provides busy work for the many interns and gives the desk workers a sense of joie de vivre because they're "making a difference." I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can ge…

>Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. My favorite thing about google's home page is having their elaborate doodles load just as I'm about to tap on the search box, leading me to an unintended search. Function over form at its finest. I've resorted to bookmarking an empty search results page.

I know everyone has their own workflow, but I'm still surprised anyone actually goes to Google's home page anymore what with their search bar being accessible from practically anywhere (browser address bar for example).

I don't remember the last time I actually went to the Google home page. What leads you there these days?

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#34

Post by vosper »

cechmaster wrote: post #28
TiredGuy wrote: post #2

The last gov team I was on had trouble with the uswds icon set. There didn't seem to be a way to import them as a font rather than as separate svgs. We noticed though that the icons were roughly based on Material Design icons, so we used the Material Design icon fonts instead and they were close enough. There were still a few icons that didn't map over, but we found some others within the new set that sufficed.

Don't use font icons, I use svg icons with and works great. Much easier to customize when you need to in my opinion.

Font Awesome uses font icons, and they seem to have accessibility figured out?

https://fontawesome.com/docs/web/dig-deeper/accessibility

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#35

Post by lloydatkinson »

mardifoufs wrote: post #30
guilhermeasg wrote: post #7

I haven't used them myself, but the GOV.UK components look and function great. https://govuk-components.netlify.app/

Wait why is the UK gov using a netlify.app link? I'm not a web dev so I'm not sure if that's common or more convenient

Well, why not? It's a great host with a whole bunch of features you'd have to invent yourself otherwise like feature branch previews. It's a static site/documentation site afterall.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#36

Post by ProfessorLayton »

haltcase wrote: post #33
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. My favorite thing about google's home page is having their elaborate doodles load just as I'm about to tap on the search box, leading me to an unintended search. Function over form at its finest. I've resorted to bookmarking an empty search results page.

I know everyone has their own workflow, but I'm still surprised anyone actually goes to Google's home page anymore what with their search bar being accessible from practically anywhere (browser address bar for example). I don't remember the last time I actually went to the Google home page. What leads you there these days?

My default address bar search is DDG, but need to fallback to google at times, and I keep my iPhone relatively google-free (Other than google voice).

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#38

Post by jrochkind1 »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #35
mardifoufs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait why is the UK gov using a netlify.app link? I'm not a web dev so I'm not sure if that's common or more convenient

Well, why not? It's a great host with a whole bunch of features you'd have to invent yourself otherwise like feature branch previews. It's a static site/documentation site afterall.

If I wanted to appear/be professional/institutional/official I'd use a custom domain though. Which i assume netlify supports, let's look... sure https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/custom-domains/

In this case to a proper government domain... aha, I bet there's some policy against pointing .gov.uk hostnames to a third-party platform?

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#39

Post by jrochkind1 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #16
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

Developers are an interesting bunch "Why does anyone use Bootstrap anymore?" and then goes and creates basically the exact same components again by hand. Seems like that same trend repeats every couple of years "[Popular library] is now outdated, let me just create an in-house clone or move to identical but trendy [Popular library]." To be clear I very much like the USWDS components, but they are mostly 1:1 with Boot…

Government agencies love making standards. It provides busy work for the many interns and gives the desk workers a sense of joie de vivre because they're "making a difference." I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can ge…

Having seen how bad government websites can be, the design area specifically included (including accessibility concerns) -- I do not consider providing a well-designed useable design system to government to be busy-work. At least not if it actually gets uptake.

This one is high-quality enough that if it was done by many interns, those are some really good interns.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#40

Post by ramenmeal »

EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

Am I misinterpreting it? To me it makes sense that smaller text would require greater contrast. I'm understanding it that larger text/headings need more contrast. Might be more eye-catching, but that doesn't make sense for accessibility.
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