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alphagov / govuk-design-system

One place for service teams to find styles, components and patterns for designing government services.
https://www.gov.uk/design-system
MIT License
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Help users understand that Design System is framework-agnostic #1518

Open EoinShaughnessy opened 3 years ago

EoinShaughnessy commented 3 years ago

What

Explain to users that Design System is framework-agnostic. We could also link to the community resources, if that seems appropriate.

Why

Some users have said that Design System does not support their framework. Actually, we provide HTML, CSS and JavaScript that users can reuse in any tech stack or framework. What we cannot make agnostic are the abstractions, like templates and macros. This is because there is no universal templating language that can be rendered server-side.

Who needs to know about this

Content Designer(s), Developers, Technical Writer

Done when

EoinShaughnessy commented 3 years ago

Feedback from @StephenGill:

Saying something like "If your service uses [this kind of tech stack], you'll be able to use the DS code directly. But we also provide the raw HTML, CSS and JavaScript in case you're using a different tech stack." might nudge govt towards a more manageable situation - because it makes the benefits clear to non-technical people.

EoinShaughnessy commented 3 years ago

Feedback from @36degrees:

I think we could be a lot more strategic with this. I think ‘community resources’ are a bit of a stop gap, and the real behaviours we’d want to encourage are getting teams and organisations to acknowledge that this is a thing they need to invest in. But some of that probably transcends the Design System and is probably better suited to the Service Manual, for example. Maybe there is a shorter term change we can make, but I’m wary of putting too much emphasis on community resources as ‘the answer’

EoinShaughnessy commented 3 years ago

Feedback from @StephenGill:

We added something to the service standard last time round which sort of addresses this -

  • actively work towards fixing any organisational or contractual issues which make it difficult to maximise availability (for example, by agreeing a common set of languages, tools, and ways of working for technical staff - either informally, or through something more formal like the GDS way)
EoinShaughnessy commented 3 years ago

Do users ever name a specific part of the website where they'd expect to see this info? Like 'Get started,' for example.