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Weeknotes - DVSA Design System workshop

While working at the DVSA in the Service Design team in Nottingham, owning the design system we use on MOT, it was great to attend a cross-DVSA Design System workshop in Birmingham to find out how we can improve it, and potentially unify our system across projects.

Organised by Head of Service Design at @DVSADigital, Paul Moran, the aim was to get designers and developers from across the DVSA together; those working on Vehicle Operator Licensing, Future Theory Test, and MOT. All these teams currently use a different design system unique to the needs of the project, including how well legacy components are supported, ease of integration, and in the case of Future Theory, the platform the service is built on making it a unique case.

While working as a developer with Service Design at DVSA I've been repeatedly impressed with the idea generation exercise, 'How Might We'. It's a really productive exercise I have learned while working with Service Design to get everyone's ideas captured on the wall, group themes, idenify risks and opportunities, and move towards actions together.

We discussed what we'd want from a design system, sharing our current situation in each project and what pain points a unified design system would help us address, and the risks involved in migrating legacy systems to a new front-end. We discussed immediate actions, and it was fun to have a quick-fire idea session for moving us towards a shared system; the objective being a consistent user experience across DVSA services, and ability to share tested, documented UI patterns among projects.