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Contribution criteria

Overview

The contents of the Design System must be of a high quality and meet user needs.

To guarantee this, all components and patterns need to meet certain criteria.

When you propose something new, the Design System team will check your proposal against this criteria before moving it to “to-do” within the community backlog (opens in a new tab) .

Criteria for proposing something new

Useful

You will need evidence that your proposal would be useful for many ONS teams, services or surveys.

This evidence could be a screenshot or link to an example of where the thing you are proposing has been used by another service.

Unique

This means that we do not have something similar to your proposal already in the Design System.

If the thing you are proposing is intended to replace an existing component or pattern, there must be evidence to show that it is better than the existing version.

How we carry your proposal forward

After your proposal has been prioritised within the community backlog (opens in a new tab) , but before it is published, the Design System team reviews it against these criteria to make sure it is:

  • usable

  • consistent

  • versatile

Usable

You will need to show that you have done user research that shows that your proposal works with a representative sample of users, including people with disabilities.

If there is not enough research yet to show that it is usable, a component or pattern can still be published with an “Experimental” tag.

However, you must still show relevant second-hand user research and it must meet the other criteria.

Consistent

Where relevant, your proposal must use our existing styles and components.

Any content, including the guidance for a pattern or component, must follow our content style guide.

If there is code, it must follow the ONS frontend coding standards and be ready to be merged into the ONS frontend library.

Versatile

Your proposal is versatile enough to be used in a range of different services.

For example, a versatile date input component could be set up to ask for:

  • a year only

  • a month and year only

  • a precise date

  • any other combination

The new thing or change has been tested and works with a range of browsers, assistive technologies and devices.

Help improve this page

Let us know how we could improve this page, or share your user research findings. Discuss this page on GitHub (opens in a new tab) 

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