Principles of the Enservio Design System
Our work should be engineered to create better experiences for the user. We want our work to be thoughtful and deliberate. This design system helps us work together to build a great experiences for all of Enservio's customers and end-users, and it helps to provide consistent experiences across all of our products and services.
Efficiency
Make the best thing the easiest thing
Think simplicity: we are going to have to own this thing we build, and we are going to be tasked to support it's continued evolution. We must make it easy for us to be nimble in the future. We should never do something just because we can or because we think it is cool. We should only do something because it is the right thing to do for the given purpose.
Standards and decisions are codified and used to provide designers and developers easy-to-use tools to expertly and efficiently deliver the highest quality experiences to users. The goal is to simplify and standardize: tools, frameworks, libraries, style, version control, and more.
Accessibility
Accessibility is not negotiable
Standards should be built with a priority on 508 compliance and WCAG guidelines at every step of the design process. From colors to code, everything required to meet high standards of accessibility should be built into this system. No shortcuts whatsoever when it comes to accessibility. We need to become experts on this topic.
Flexibility
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Review, test, evaluate, and repurpose patterns, code, and designs from other foundations, repositories and style guides to make use of tried-and-true best practices. Do not create new components or recreate existing components unless the new pattern will be applicable to other existing properties. We want our work to be smart, methodical, efficient, and most of all functional. We want to use all of the tools we have available, but only when it makes us (or our partners) smarter, more efficient, more functional, and more effective.