1 — Project Goal
Create and maintain a design system to enable developers and designers to reuse proven user experience patterns within an ecosystem of organizations. Named Pelican Design System, it is being actively designed and developed for official web applications for the state of Louisiana.
2 — Target Audience
The primary users are senior, mid-level, and junior developers, and user experience designers. Secondary users are business analysts and product owners. Tertiary users are stakeholders who decide to adopt the design system for their products.
3 — Research & Key Challenges
The design system's original research was performed by taking a user interface inventory of two vast web applications being modernized. Research never stops — the design system is continually applied to newly discovered web applications. Performing an inventory across a myriad of official web applications is a monumental task requiring flexibility to accommodate unknown use cases.
4 — Initial Design Concepts & Wireframes
Original concepts were created as wireframes between design team members. We chose final concepts from those which the whole team agreed could be most easily sold to external stakeholders. Wireframes were shared with business analysts and developers who have the most exposure to the design system outside of the design team.
5 — Usability Testing
Usability testing started out by gathering successful design systems as inspirations. We chose design systems whose creator's halo effect would help prove parallel values. We also used wireframes to create imaginary but feasible interface scenarios to show how the system would provide quicker turn-arounds and reusable benefits.
6 — Conclusion
The Pelican Design System is currently at version 2. Pelican 3 is in the early research and ideation stage to build it from scratch instead of basing it upon Bootstrap.
