Design Systems

The previous post argued that service patterns - the repeatable structures of work that users perform across multiple products - need to be understood before the components that implement them can be...

A few months into building components for the design system, I keep returning to a question that predates the code: what are these components actually for? Components are for building interfaces, but...

The previous post identified four orientations that public sector programmes tend toward - risk, efficiency, provider, and demand - and showed how each orientation shapes which failures become...

If services are fundamentally promise-based systems - where capabilities promise performance and resources promise affordance - what happens when promises break? And more troublingly: what happens...

Last week I was asked to scope what it would take to build a React component library for a national healthcare data platform. As I've been writing the scoping document, I keep returning to a tension...

The design systems framework I have been developing includes events as one of eight core elements, defined following Gärdenfors (2017) as atomic cause-effect triggers with a force vector and a result...

Duncan Stephen's recent post, "Services are verbs combined with nouns", addresses the nouns, verbs best way to describe service ontologies problem, and which I also wrote about in states and services...

Building a design systems framework for data platform products, I keep running into the same architectural decision: should the framework distinguish products from services - and if so, how?

The Design Systems Working Group has been developing a hierarchy of service patterns - from policy down to pixels, mapping how the data products products relate to broader service journeys. That work...

"Be consistent" seems like uncontroversial design advice. Nielsen's usability heuristics include "consistency and standards" - users "should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or...

In Part 1, I described how our design systems working group was stopped by a colleague's observation that we needed to establish fundamental principles before rushing into patterns and components. In...

When I joined the team, I inherited a design guide. Previous designers had recognised the same problem I described in Why Design Principles?: products built in the vendor's application builder do not...

A few weeks ago, in one of our design systems working group sessions, a colleague asked a question that brought our entire approach into focus. We had been discussing UI patterns, component...

The previous post examined Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics - a formal system for specifying statistical visualisations through composition of fundamental elements. Wilkinson showed that a creative...