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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

#81

Post by knowuh »

darekkay wrote: post #47
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

I can't tell you how much I love that your first example of contrast failure is HN.

> Our favorite orange website isn't leading by example, either. Some comments are almost unreadable

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#82

Post by gedy »

wanda wrote: post #15
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 Seems like that same trend repeats every couple of years "[Popular library] is now outdated, let me just create an in-house clone or move to identical but trendy [Popular library]."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…

Nope, you're not missing anything really, but I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3. I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use. In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda. Front-end isn't th…

> I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3

Just to clarify, Bootstrap is designed to be themeable, they don't hardcode styles. Examples: https://www.bootstrapcdn.com/bootswatch/

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#83

Post by game_the0ry »

Super interesting project, but....uh oh, I see a package.json.

I hope that our federal government has staffed enough experienced node devs to keep an eye on any rogue deps that get added to the project, though it should go without saying.

And it looks like they use Snyk so that's something.

However, I do not like that you have to email them to raise a security issue [1]. To easy for some wannabe product manager bureaucrat to suppress that out of fear and embarrassment.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#85

Post by lelandfe »

jfengel wrote: post #42
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.

The background is nearly white at #fcfcfc, and the body copy is an 80% black color (roughly #323232). That is a contrast ratio of 12.49:1, which far exceeds even the most stringent contrast requirements in WCAG 2.1 AAA of 7:1.

The "Color, Color Family, and Grade" callout box has the same color text but an #e6e6e6 background, which produces a contrast ratio of 10.27:1 – also passing.

Everyone has different preferences, but in terms of color contrast they're doing great.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#86

Post by sakopov »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #8
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…

I would find real peace of mind in a design system maintained by a government that guarantees compliance with that government's accessibility requirements.

Any kind of technical compliance by government is guaranteed to be old and obsolete in the near future. The reality of the situation is that this "design system" is a waste of time and it will never iterate as fast as other systems maintained by industry experts in web compliance and accessibility.

This is just a case where folks are happy that our government isn't doing shit in Dreamweaver anymore and has moved on to something that resembles progress. However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#87

Post by bobabob »

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…

I call that the @tiangolo/FastAPI pattern of open source software.

After individuals noticed that it's possible to make tons of money through donations/sponsors on Github and providing support for their OSS many just rebrand libraries by sugar coating abstractions on top of it (what FastAPI did to Starlette) and trying to own all parts of the development (by not giving access to anyone on the project for example) so that they own they're seen as the only person able to provide true support for it.

See https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 and https://github.com/tiangolo

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#89

Post by XorNot »

alephnan wrote: post #71
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…

I studied computer science and have been software engineer for almost a decade. Before college I came from a design background. I also went back to design school after I already became a senior engineer. One thing I've noticed is that art students have looked into pivoting into UI/UX design because it pays. There are skills and intuition that transfer, such as designing for visual hierarchy. In fact, there are even s…

I actually really hate material design in general. It's "okay" on Android, and that's the only place it works.

The Material web design layout never feels good in the browser - it's floaty. Interactions don't ever feel "solid" - basically the experience is always like using a buggy webapp where you're thinking you need to open the dev panel to see if it's erroring silently. Try using any of Google's setting panels or the like compared to an old school bootstrap app - regardless of actual quality, you constantly feel like your interactions with Google are being ignored and that's on Material designs floatiness.

Bootstrap feels solid and clean. Heck even the AWS UI console - which is broken a ton of the time between corporate IAM and just jank - always feels more responsive to your inputs.

It's just a terrible system.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#90

Post by bluetwo »

I have used this several times, and I have to say I really like the lightweight setup of the V1 version of this and can't stand the V2 version they now support.

The V1, which you can still download, just works so well out of the box it is amazing. It adds styles to the base tags and is easy to just drop into an html site you are already working on. You only have to add classes when you need to do something different than the defaults.

V2 makes you add classes everywhere, which means content managed by HTML editors like CKedit won't work without extra pain.

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