The GOV.UK Design System is iterating more quickly
A theory of mine is that we can make the experience of digital government better by iterating and improving the interaction layer more frequently. That job is made easier for teams across government thanks to the GOV.UK Design System.
But in order to do that, the GOV.UK Design System needs to iterate more frequently, getting new or updated components and patterns out the door more often.
And that’s easier said than done! Quality can’t be rushed. But a design system can’t serve its users well if it moves too slowly either.
If you look at releases of GOV.UK Frontend – the code part of the GOV.UK Design System – you can see it’s getting faster. In the last 6 months (March 2024 to October 2023) there have been 10 releases. In the 12 months before that, there were just 5 releases.
What does this tell us? The team is releasing twice as often in half the time.
That’s awesome!
Deployment frequency is one of the core DORA metrics for measuring and improving software delivery performance. And their research shows that ‘a team’s software delivery capability reliably predicts the value that the team provides to their organisation’ – which in this case is digital government.
There’s a lot of effort and change – technical, process, and cultural change – that goes in to making that speed a reality. A lot of hard work by good people. Both learning and development and changing your approach to delivery can help.
So maybe, just maybe, if the design system is updated more frequently, we’ll see services updated more frequently too, which should result in a higher quality experience for users.
That’s correlation more than causation, but I reckon there is a link. So let’s see whether it has an impact.
Onwards!