Recap: Ideation session 1

Meeting recap: Ideation session 1 (11-13-2017)

Summary

On Monday, November 13, 2017, the US Web Design Standards Core team met for about three hours to discuss our ideas, pain points, questions, and frames of reference around planning for the future of the Standards. We collected our thoughts on a mural, then grouped, named, and voted to get a preliminary sense the team’s interests and priorities. The discussion covered a lot of ground but the highest vote getter at the end of the day was “Do less, be simpler, expect customization.” This meeting, and a subsequent meeting about [component workflow](Recap: Component workflow session) also stressed the importance of larger, explicit vision for the Standards — something that will give the team focus as we look to optimize and build for the future.

Attendees

• Maya Benari
• John Donmoyer
• Andrea Sigritz
• Dan Williams, product owner

What we did

• We came to the meeting with ideas, known pain points (either our own, or those we’ve discovered from others), questions we want to ask, and references to other design systems, articles, or other items we felt relevant to the future of the Standards.
• We added these ideas to a mural coding them as idea (yellow), pain point (white), question (purple), or reference (black).
• We took time to read through the cards on the mural, then sorted the cards together.
• After sorting, we added our own descriptive titles (mostly nouns) to the groups, and moved the groups around to indicate relationships between groups.
• Then we tried to transform the group the titles to action items — that is, to look at the title of the group and the cards included in the group and write an action we could take consistent with that content. (For example, “Theming” → “Support theming”; “Build guidance” → “Make it easier to build”)
• We gave ourselves 6 votes, and voted on the action items.

The mural

Voting results

What we learned

1. We have a lot of ideas. Each team member brought a lot of thinking to the table, and the mural ended up with dozens of cards in a wide range of categories.
2. We’re very concerned with the process of building with the Standards. Most of us have built sites (or parts of sites) with the Standards, and have personal experience with the process. We want to make it easy for designers and developers to build new things quickly, and to have a system that encourages creative problem solving on top of a solid, accessible foundation. We want to build for building.
3. We know that most projects extend and customize the Standards. Rare is the unmodified “vanilla” Standards project. We want to make sure the Standards are built to customize with flexibility and consistency — that customizations extend the Standards without breaking core functionality and accessibility.
4. We know that we can’t build everything ourselves. Supporting building and customizing the Standards supports extending the Standards — which is critical, since we know our time is limited and we can’t address every need in every product. How can we make it easier to build new things, and give general design and evaluative guidance that might help provide a pathway for components developed outside the Core team to get official support?
5. Utility classes could be useful. Utility classes represent stylistic building blocks that fit with our desire for consistency, modularity, interoperability, and ease of building/prototyping.
6. We have a lot to learn from NAVA’s work forking the Standards for The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). This work presented a clear model for how the Standards might evaluate its own work.
7. The project needs vision. And vision requires more research. We feel like there is opportunity for meaningful change, but that change (if it really is change) needs to be driven by a research-based vision. What is the problem we’re solving and how can we use our time and energy to better solve it? If we want to “Do less and be simpler” we need to know what we’re optimizing around.
8. We should also remember what we do well. As much as we talk about vision and change, we should stay grounded in the value we’re already providing and the real benefits of the Standards right now.
9. Ideation is OK, but presenting proposals could give better focus. Ideation can help give a sense of the lay of the land and expose ideas to air, but they can also be abstract, diffuse, and may not lead to practical work. How can we use our time together on evaluating real proposals for solutions?

Next steps

• Develop research goals and a research plan for this increment. (#2230)
• Answer the questions posed in this 18F Setting the Product Vision deck. (#2231)
• Create some questions we want to ask (or assumptions we want to validate) at the Clarity design systems conference at the end of November. (#2232)
• Meet to develop a draft vision statement. (#2233)
• Develop a regular cadence by which we can develop and present proposals to the Core group for new work, outside the issue workflow. (#2234)
• Publish these recaps publicly. (#2235)