State of Michigan's Digital Guidelines
I was brought onto the State of Michigan's Digital Experience team in 2023 to help create a cohesive visual language for the state within their established design system, Digital Guidelines.
Easier said than done! The Digital Experience team knew that they had a group of components, style elements, and rules to apply, but not only did they not know how to organize them, they also didn't know how to get all the different departments in the State—all 20 of them!—to comply with them! After all, while the Digital Experience team was more than willing to answer questions, the number of emails in an inbox set aside for State employees' questions and requests was staggering, and keeping the team from focusing on their job.
Not to mention Digital Guidelines' target audience: users employed in various State of Michigan departments who were asked to design a webpage for their department, but who had never used CSS, installed a package manager, or designed a site at all before. That's why it was my job to explain design principles and coding in an accessible format.
One of our biggest issues was organizing the information—and there was a lot to organize.
This involved meeting with designers and developers to discuss how the various components, utilities, and foundations worked together, how they differentiated from each other, how to make them accessible, and—most importantly—how to use them together.
Keeping in mind our stakeholders' needs, I spent a lot of time collaborating with the developers and designers to ensure that I was explaining everything accurately and correctly.
The result:
17 components
1o utilities
Five months
...to put out three different releases!
The number of questions in our inbox fell about by half within a month after the design language was established, as well. I considered this to be one of the strongest assessments of the strength of the project: if users could find what they needed without having to ask, then it meant that Digital Guidelines was accessible and easy to understand.
