Leeds City Council

Web site and service design is a resource intensive and costly exercise across local authorities. Many authorities lack resources to do the work in house, relying on third party suppliers and products to plug the gaps. Providing standardised and thoroughly tested user interface designs considerably lowers the barriers for in-house developers, particularly in organisations that lack niche skills like UX design and user testing.

The GDS roadmap highlights the need for the GDS Design System to make it easier for services that don’t look like GOV.UK to use the Design System and to extend it to include other components (as listed on the backlog).

This would

• Reduce the need to re-implement and retest components and designs
• Improve accessibility and usability through the use of tested components
• Reduce the cost of in-house user research and end user testing

Discovery evidence

Following the work we have undertaken on the Leeds.gov.uk website we would like to work with other organisations to investigate how the Design System could be extended to produce a ‘white label’ Design System to help open it up to local authorities, and how the code could be maintained and distributed, versioned etc. This could also include existing components already developed or used that could be adapted as candidates for the Design System. This will allow easier branding and customisation of layouts and components, and would make it easier to use and adapt across different authorities and development platforms.