Design Systems Team

Mission
Through engagement with WMF staff, partners and volunteers, the Design Systems Team develops an overarching strategy for frontend design and engineering across Wikimedia. This includes building and maintaining a design system platform for wikis that provides shared services of tools and guidelines for building user interfaces in an efficient, scalable, and equitable way.

This work supports audiences that are critical to developing new knowledge experiences by ensuring that they are successful in creating, maintaining, and extending frontend features across Wikimedia with consistency and ease.

Vision
Provide a comprehensive, reusable, extensible way to build frontends on Wikimedia platforms by creating a universal design style guide and a shared development kit that codifies the design principles and guidelines in a library of UI components.

Current state of frontend development
 * Many user-interface libraries used by different teams and projects
 * Redundant effort for designers and engineers
 * Inconsistent designs
 * Inconsistent standards for contribution
 * Challenging to onboard
 * UIs depend on coupled backend logic

Ideal future-state of frontend development
 * Less feature redundancy
 * Consistent user experience across all Wikimedia projects
 * Web-accessible and multilingual by default
 * Standardized browser and device support
 * Faster onboarding
 * Faster software upgrades
 * Systems thinking: teams make an impact outside of immediate focus area

Wikimedia Design System & Codex
The Wikimedia Design System is the place where all of the components and patterns that designers use to create products are systematically organized, in such a way that they are easy to find, modify and create new parts. The design system is grounded in a set of principles and guidelines designed with for consistency, efficiency, web accessibility and internationalization by default.

Codex is the frontend development toolkit used for implementing the Wikimedia Design Style Guide in code. Codex provides engineers with UI components that are built in JavaScript (Vue.js), design tokens to store data for design values, and user-facing documentation.

Frontend Technology
Wikimedia's medium-term Platform Evolution plan set out to prioritize modern engineering practices, performance, and ease-of-use for contributors of varying experience levels. As a result, the Design Systems Team organized the Vue.js Developer Summit which led to the decision to adopt Vue.js as the official programming framework for MediaWiki.

Contribution Guidelines
In progress.

Goals

 * 100% of right-to-left (RTL) languages on Wikipedia are supported in Codex


 * 100% of Codex components are fully conformant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 level AA (WCAG)
 * There is no substantial increase in article page load time as a result of using Codex
 * 2+ teams opt-in to adopting the design system long-term, in addition to Abstract Wikipedia, Readers Web, and WMDE

Features
Components Design Tokens
 * TypeaheadSearch (Readers Web), Menu (non-scrolling), MenuItem, SearchInput, ProgressBar, Thumbnail, Message, Lookup, Button (disabled), ToggleButton, Tabs
 * Colors, Opacities, (Box-)Shadows, Borders, Animations/Transitions, Spacing and Sizing, Typographic Styles, Grids, Layouts, Breakpoints

Goals

 * Increase community contributions to web products by 50% via design system contributions
 * 100% of new wiki projects with user interfaces are designed using the design system
 * There is no loss in reading or editing capabilities for any population as a result of Vue software upgrades
 * Increase contributor satisfaction around the UI component building process by 25%
 * Increase contributor velocity of building UI components by 20%

Features
Pending

Team

 * Anne Tomasevich, Senior Software Engineer
 * Bárbara Martínez, Senior UX Designer
 * Eric Gardner, Senior Software Engineer
 * Jess Klein, Principal Designer
 * Lauren de Lench, Senior Technical Program Manager
 * Nat Hillard, Senior Engineering Manager
 * Roan Kattouw, Principal Software Engineer
 * STH, Senior Product Manager
 * Volker E., Lead User Experience Engineer, Design System and Readers Web