A Universal Fusion of the Team
summary
Government sites share six predictable failures — inconsistent tech (surprising prevalence of jQuery), missing search, awful performance and accessibility, bizarre bespoke designs — and a design system (USWDS, atomic components, Storybook + Sketch/Zeplin/Figma, Lerna for releases) actually eliminates much design and technical debt, speeds onboarding and enables component-driven, versioned releases. Implementation takes months not weeks, contractors promising “one month” fail, and gradual rollouts or dual-run (old + new) work best; a design system helps but is not a silver bullet and requires cross-team ownership.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:54Government websites pain
- 7:43What is a design system
- 9:53Design hell at projects
- 15:34Design system benefits
- 17:00Who owns the design system
- 21:40Switching to design system
- 26:29When not to use design system
- 29:23Bad advice on design systems
- 36:55Summary and tools
- 46:07Q&A
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