Document early ideas and references for shipping things we're unsure of

[CharlotteDowns]

What

As part of Understand what changes we will make to our processes to ship things we're unsure of we have suggested some ideas for ways we can communicate this to our users.

This work captures early thoughts, prototypes and references for how we might go about the changes.

Why

To provide more context and dimension to our ideas.

[CharlotteDowns]

Idea: Re-categorise the website to indicate confidence we have in components and patterns

Experiments

This suggestion adds metadata to the top of each component page, we would establish some conventions for our statuses and explain them in full in a separate piece of guidance. In this example, we have used 'Theoretical' and 'Evidenced' which is terminology taken from the GOV.UK Design System Accessibility Strategy.

There is further thought about whether accessibility could be included in this metadata too. This could be timed with WCAG 2.2 callout removal.

At the moment the 'Status' links to the backlog issue thread of the component but it could also link to:

• research section on the page
• the github history of the page
• archives

References

• Node.js offer a stability index that they use to provide further context to features in their guidance. The index they use categorises their stability into:
  • 0 - Deprecated
  • 1 - Experimental (further description on their page)
  • 2 - Stable
  • 3 - Legacy
• MoJ Design System are already using metadata
• Very interesting read on the concept of 'epistemic disclosure' or 'epistemic status'

Feedback

This sounds a little like the experimental tag with a different name. I think that’s fine, however there are things the experimental tag was missing that led to it failing as a feature that I think we need to think about if we implement something like this:

1. Somewhere on the website we need a very explicit definition of what ‘experimental’ or whatever means. As we saw with the exp tag, in the absence of clear deffinition, uers created their own to fill the void. I recall a few users on support asking when certain patterns wouldn’t be experimental anymore so that they could start using them!
2. We need criteria of what stops a pattern or component being experimental anymore. I remember helping Char with some investigation into the exp tag and none of the things marked with the tag ever stopped being experimental. Obviously folks were using them and feeding back to us but we weren’t collecting it efficiently or making decisions.
3. This is mentioned in several places in this board but we need a process of regular review of our library items so that we do actually revisit stuff.

[CharlotteDowns]

I've also created a spreadsheet which contains metadata about the components in the Design System as of today (23 October 2024).

The sheet has information using these columns:

Component	Published	Last updated	Previously experimental	Status
Example component	dd Month yyyy	dd Month yyyy	Yes