Program Design Systems Week 2024

Design Systems Week featured a number of short talks about the how and why of design systems. All online. In 2024, we've covered subjects like managing design systems, integrating accessibility, user research and code.

Using USWDS Accessibility Tests to Develop Accessibility Skills Across Government Teams

Amy will share plain-language accessibility tests the USWDS team has created for checking the accessibility of individual components. Attendees will learn how any web team — technical or not — can use these tests to perform baseline manual accessibility testing (like keyboard, screen reader, mobile, and zoom magnification testing) on their own sites. She will also describe the team’s iterative design and development process for these checklists, and how other teams can develop their own.

Amy Cole is an accessibility manager and a contractor on the USWDS Core team. She is a seasoned Digital Accessibility Manager who has been making significant contributions to the field of digital media for many years, finding joy in exploring ways to enhance online spaces and making them more accessible. She values the opportunity to collaborate with other professionals in the field, always seeking to expand her knowledge and skills.

Testing UI

Building a Design System is exciting. But once your system is out there being used to power production applications, rolling out updates becomes a risky endeavor. Testing is a critical aspect of design systems development and maintenance that helps manage those risks. In this talk, Gert explains tools and strategies that help you test your UI components and integrations, so your design system can continue to evolve.

Gert Hengeveld is a staff software engineer at Chromatic, the company behind Storybook. He works with the rest of the Storybook team to envision and build the future of UI development and testing. Gert is a problem solver who's passionate about UX and has been involved in open source software development for over a decade. He's often a designer's biggest critic as well as their greatest ally.

Design Systems: Choose your own adventure

Join Geri, a seasoned design systems explorer with 8 years of adventures under her belt, as she navigates the uncharted territories of accessibility in a major product org. With no playbook in hand, Geri’s quest is one we can all relate to: figuring it out as we go along.

In this ‘choose your own adventure’ session, you’ll discover how the principles of design systems can illuminate a path through any new challenge. Come prepared to laugh, learn, and maybe even get a little lost as we embark on a journey of getting teams onboard with digital accessibility.

Geri is a design systems consultant from London. As design and accessibility lead on design systems at News UK and Lloyds Banking Group, she helped some of the UK's largest media and banking brands to design at scale. She is currently Lead Accessibility Specialist at Just Eat Takeaway. Geri is a keen accessibility advocate, amateur writer and documentation nerd.

CSS for internationalisation

Internationalisation is more than translating the content on your site into multiple languages and calling it a day. There are various nuances to the presentation of that content which affect the experience of a native speaker using your site. There are CSS properties that provide layout and typographic capabilities for scripts and writing systems beyond the Latin-based horizontal top-to-bottom ones that are predominantly seen on the web today.

Hui Jing is a self-taught designer and developer living in Singapore, who loves CSS way more than the average web developer. With more than a decade of experience working on the web, her main focus is building performant and responsive frontend interfaces. And yes, Hui Jing is a two-word Chinese first name. She can often be found spanning routes in some local climbing gym.

Advantages to working in the open with government design systems

For many governments, contributing to open source project is culturally a challenge. It often requires engagement with people in other departments and often outside of government. Design systems however provide a unique opportunity for governments to become more confident in their open source adoption. Mike has contributed to several government design systems. As a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer, he is often looking for best practices and comparing different approaches taken by governments around the world.

Mike is CivicActions’ Open Standards & Practices Lead and a thought leader on open government, as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with governments in North America and Europe, and spoken internationally. He is also a W3C Invited Expert and recognized authoring tool accessibility expert. Mike has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and has served as a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012.

Common direction, boring magic

Lessons from working on the GOV.‌UK Design System and other common platforms in UK government. How leaning on the principles that make the Web great can create more value for the public we serve.

Steve is a freelance product strategist, working on planning.data.gov.uk at Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government currently. He’s passionate about innovation for the public good and open, ethical product design. He’s worked at startups, Government Digital Service and NHS Digital, and has taught product management to people from numerous companies through General Assembly.