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USWDS basics

For repository-specific info, see the README.

Here’s how I think through and prioritize ("I" being Anne Petersen, current USWDS lead: hi 👋) USWDS work, from broadly to more specifically:

• USWDS mission, vision, polestar
• USWDS product values
• USWDS design principles
• USWDS engineering values
• USWDS architectural decision records

And then even more concretely, here's the USWDS lifecycle process — this is how the system gets added to or significantly changed. Each step has a bunch of sub-steps: that page is a high-level overview. More minor changes go through other processes.

USWDS is an open source (and public domain!) product: you — yes, you! — can get involved.

USWDS becomes a better system with more community involvement.

History

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) was created by a collaborative team at 18F and the U.S. Digital Service in 2015, under the guidance of an advisory board of talented, experienced government staff in the CFPB, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, and GSA. USWDS is now a product of GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, maintained by the Digital Services Division. Read about the initial process and learn where we’ve been and where we’re going.

How to contribute

Contribution guidelines

Community / roles and responsibilities

Planning

Release process

How to cut new USWDS releases, step by step.

Workflow

The process the USWDS internal team uses for incoming issues and pull requests.

Strategy and roadmap

Roadmap

This roadmap shows work intended to start in the short- and medium-terms. Our site's product roadmap page provides a little more context.

Design principles

Research

Usability testing process

Best practices for testing with people with disabilities

Recruitment outreach procedure

Usability testing day checklist

“Zebra batch” component usability research findings Q1 2024

Specific research questions for each component in "Zebra" testing Disabled states research findings 2023

Usability research findings for Q3 2023

Examples

Websites using the Design System

Implementations of USWDS in other frameworks, content management systems, etc.

USWDS community assets: A place to share how you’ve extended an implementation of core USWDS or see how others have done so.

Archive

• 2017-era issue label glossary - A glossary of the labels used on the issues in our repos, and a guide to how our team applies them.

• 2017-era distribution methods - A table of various distribution implementations of the System.

• 2016-era component prioritization - The factors that guide our UI component prioritization process.