Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

USWDS: The United States Web Design System

designsystem.digital.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 151 posts

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#41

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> 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 buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose!

Modern UX design fads appear to be a UX trainwreck.

It's kind of sad when the supposed experts choose to badly screw up stuff that had already been figured out. Sometimes it seems UX rule one is: show you're better than your users by invalidating their investment and making your UI harder to use once they've gotten used to it.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#42

Post by jfengel »

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…

The contrast on that Using Color page seems unexpectedly low to me. The text is dark gray on a light gray background. It's not unreadable, and I assume it follows their own guidelines, but I find it draining to read.

There is a dark-gray-on-white area on the front page that I find more pleasant to read.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#43

Post by dimitrisnl »

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.

I believe it's about not using their domain as whole.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#46

Post by rado »

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…

BS is an opinionated framework aimed towards app devs who need UI for their web app ASAP. It's not suitable for all cases and required some tweaking to boot up (rounded buttons, hidden focus ring etc).

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#47

Post by darekkay »

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…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion.

From a developer perspective, working with color palettes with defined "magic numbers" is really great. I have written a blog post [1] around this topic and wrote a tool [2] to calculate/ensure accessible magic numbers for color palettes.

[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-color-palette/

[2] https://github.com/darekkay/a11y-contrast

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#48

Post by sodality2 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #38
lloydatkinson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>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?

Some guidance that might be relevant: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/use-your-govuk-domain-name?step-...

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#49

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

Or they wedge it all into a hamburger menu because "we prioritize mobile". Fine, but how hard would it be to expand the options for a laptop?

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#50

Post by vkou »

deepspace wrote: post #44

Canada has a similar Web Design System. It is very, very white, with a touch of red and blue. https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html

As a user, I also think it's fantastic, from a design and usability perspective. (I can't speak for accessibility.)

It's snappy, clean, and not at all bloated. I dread the day that some MBA introduces Silicon Valley KPI reviews and perf metrics to the government, leading to some middle-level engineer replacing that simple, clean, bell-and-whistle-free design with some built-for-promo bloated garbage.

Post reply on HN