18F UX Guide

18F user experience (UX) designers join cross-functional teams to collaboratively improve user experiences across government. This guide is here to help us get the job done. It’s neither a step-by-step tutorial nor a set of rules. Instead, it’s a starting point for 18F-led UX design: doing it, discussing it, and ensuring it’s done to a consistent level of quality. This guide is iterative and you can review our goals, contribute or get a general overview below.

---

Table of contents

1. About
2. Our approach
   1. Values and principles
   2. Defining design
   3. Stay lean
   4. Meet partners where they are
3. Research
   1. Clarify the basics
   2. Plan
   3. Do
   4. Make research actionable
   5. Legal
   6. Privacy
   7. Bias
   8. Ethics
4. Design
   1. Build a prototype
   2. Use a design system
5. Resources

Development

The UX Guide uses USWDS-Jekyll.

Build

To build locally using Docker (recommended):

1. Install Docker for Mac
2. Clone this repository
3. From this repository's root directory, run docker-compose up --build
4. Open http://localhost:4000

Or, build locally without Docker:

1. Clone this repository
2. Install Jekyll and the necessary dependencies by running bundle install
3. Run the web server: bundle exec jekyll serve
4. Open http://localhost:4000

---

Contributors

This guide was collaboratively authored by members of 18F’s UX team past and present. While the initial content was pulled together over a few months, the guide builds on institutional knowledge from across 18F over the years. The following are the original members of the UX guide working group:

• Qituwra Anderson
• Melissa Braxton
• Jeremy Canfield
• Jennifer Damis
• Matt Dobson
• Vishal Iyer
• John Donmoyer
• Nikki Lee
• Julia Lindpaintner
• Corey Mahoney
• Andrew Maier
• Anne Petersen
• Ben Peterson
• Jacklynn Pham
• Laura Poncé
• Aditi Rao
• Mark Trammell