I really like the look of this and think it is a great initiative. Especially as I am the only human on earth who don't love Material Design more than my own mother.
Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
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Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#12Hopefully this guide will be updated as time goes on to stay relevant as technology changes. Otherwise in a few years from now, everything will look outdated again.
It's all open source and in the public domain: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards
They're also pretty active with the pull request system: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/pulls and have a CONTRIBUTING guide: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/blob/18f-pages-s...
I attended a presentation by one of the people working on the project last week and they put a lot of thought into both how to make this a usable guide for now and how to keep it growing into the future. The USDS has attracted some really great people lately, and it shows!
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#13Hopefully this guide will be updated as time goes on to stay relevant as technology changes. Otherwise in a few years from now, everything will look outdated again.
Looking outdated isn't the worst thing in a world. I think National Forest signs look like hotel signs from the 1950s, and that's probably not a coincidence.
What's more interesting is if this will lead to better maintainability. Since this includes code as well as guidelines, hopefully it will reduce the variation between various agencies' websites. That in turn should make future upgrades more uniform and therefore less costly.
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#14Nice, they use SASS/Bourbon/Neat for their styling.[0][1] Huge fan and recommend it to anyone using Ruby for web development.
[0] - https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/getting-started/
[1] - http://bourbon.io/
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#15When design becomes a standard, is its purpose not lost?
As a designer, my job isn't to "design a website," it is to design patterns of UI/UX and a framework to build new features and interactions for a particular application. Basically, a designer's first job is to design the lego blocks. Then she can build stuff with it.
The application in this case is the U.S. Government. The purpose of this design is to provide the lego blocks and framework for developers and designers to build an interaction layer for the federal government.
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#16I encourage people to check out 18F's Github repos...there's a lot of useful tools and libraries, for starters. And then there's full projects to learn from, such as APIs and front-facing static sites.
I don't know if they use any other kind of project manager besides Github Issues, but their projects have among the most active Issues activity...it seems that the USDS/18F team uses them as project discussion rooms that also happen to be public...as they should be for government, public facing work. And they accept pull requests from the public...here's one I made to make their style guides more readable on mobile/non-traditional-browsers:
https://github.com/18F/content-guide/pull/43
They talked about it amongst themselves (in public) and then merged it in. I know that's part for course for most industry teams...but not for the federal government. Think about all the regulations and CYA-guideliens (cover-your-ass) that have built-up over the years that would've made accepting code, or any input, from a total outsider, to be...not a priority. A few years ago I remember finding a very obvious, easily fixable XSS vulnerability across all of the Department of Homeland Security sites...not only was it hard to find a point of contact, but I was pretty much ignored until I sent emails to US-CERT, and then also threatened to have a tech journalist write about it.
With the USDS projects, it's a completely different paradigm to work via systems like Github. At the very least, you can more easily take credit for suggestions/fixes you made.
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#17When design becomes a standard, is its purpose not lost?
It depends on what you're trying to achieve. US Government sites aren't about creating an artistic experience. It's more important that digital services are delivered consistently and give citizens a good UX. As an experience, the design hinges on creating trust, accessibility, and being able to carry what you've learned about the interface to different sites. These things won't degrade easily with time. For instance, the significance of the color blue won't change rapidly (barring a large scale invasion by blue extraterrestrials).
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#18OK, now that it's back up, let's take a look at the examples. There's a "register to vote" page, but that's trivial. Here's a more difficult one - a mockup of a Veterans Administration form.[1] This is clearly for use by a Government employee, not the public. (The first question one asks is, if an appeal is "certified", why does it also have to be "activated" by a human before anything happens? But that's the organiz…
You're probably better off submitting an issue on GitHub than dropping a bug report here.
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#19When design becomes a standard, is its purpose not lost?
You might be thinking about different "design". In this particular case USDS tries to "design" (as in engineering or architecture) efficient, cross-organizational set of guidelines to keep look consistent across all government websites. This should lead to same standard of UX and AX, which should lower amount of confusion of customers and lower costs building new projects.
You can think about it as of Twitter Bootstrap for government websites.
Re: Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards
#20OK, now that it's back up, let's take a look at the examples. There's a "register to vote" page, but that's trivial. Here's a more difficult one - a mockup of a Veterans Administration form.[1] This is clearly for use by a Government employee, not the public. (The first question one asks is, if an appeal is "certified", why does it also have to be "activated" by a human before anything happens? But that's the organiz…
> The "POA" heading is misaligned. You can tell they used table-less design - things don't line up right.
Um, that's not the case. Those look like table tags, as they should be (it's a table). The only problem is that that column header is left-aligned, not right-aligned like the rows are.
Most of your complaints are bullshit, frankly, and the rest are about interaction design/UX, not visual design, which is all that this project claimed to be. The visual design and layout look fine, with the exception of that misaligned column heading (the horror!).