The contents of the GOV.UK Design System are high quality and meet user needs. To guarantee this, all components and patterns must meet certain criteria.
To be successful, proposals need to show that the component or pattern being suggested would be useful and unique.
| Criteria | Description |
|---|---|
| Useful | There is evidence that this component or pattern would be useful for many teams or services. Evidence could be screenshots or links to versions of it being used in different services. |
| Unique | It doesn’t duplicate something which already exists in the GOV.UK Design System, unless it’s intended to replace it. |
The Design System working group reviews proposals in the community backlog to check they meet these criteria. Proposals that meet the criteria will then be moved into the 'To do' column, ready to be worked on.
The working group reviews the implementation to make sure it is usable, consistent and versatile.
| Criteria | Description |
|---|---|
| Usable | It has been tried in user research and shown to work with a representative sample of users, including those with disabilities. Components and patterns which are not proven usable can be published as experimental. But they must be clearly based on relevant user research from other organisations and best practice, and meet the other criteria. |
| Consistent | It reuses existing styles and components in the GOV.UK Design System where possible. Both the guidance and any content included in examples must follow the GOV.UK content style guide. Any code follows the GOV.UK Frontend coding standards and is ready to merge into GOV.UK Frontend. |
| Versatile | The implementation is versatile enough that component or pattern can be used in a range of different services that may need it. 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, or any other combination you may need. The component or pattern must also have been tested and shown to work with a range of browsers, assistive technologies and devices. |
To find out more, read the GOV.UK Design System contribution guidelines.