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 UI Library
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.

Initiative OKRs
The following long-term goals speak to our values and commitment to supporting Wikimedia contributors and product teams. Specific metrics are open to adjustments as the Design System deploys to various partnerships.

Running Metrics

 * 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)
 * 100% of net-new Wikimedia projects with user interfaces are designed using the design system

Target Metrics

 * At least 3 product teams at Wikimedia commit to adopting the Design System as their primary method for building UIs in FY2022-23
 * Increase community contributions to web products by 50% via design system contributions
 * Increase contributor satisfaction around the UI component building process by 25%
 * Increase contributor velocity of building UI components by 20%

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

 * There is no substantial increase in article page load time as a result of using Codex
 * There is no loss in reading or editing capabilities for any population as a result of Vue software upgrades

Contribution Guidelines
We welcome contributions from everyone! There are several ways to contribute:


 * Adding or commenting on tasks in our project management system, Phabricator (links below)
 * Contributing to the design process
 * Suggesting new components and design tokens
 * Writing and submitting code
 * Reviewing code
 * Updating and expanding library documentation

Contributions to Codex are covered by the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces.

How to stay up-to-date
To keep all those interested in using or contributing to Codex up-to-date on topics of design, development, roadmaps, and releases, the Design Systems Team will:


 * Use Phabricator to publicly track the work, giving others the opportunity to subscribe to tasks, add comments, or claim tasks.
 * Keep our team page up-to-date with information about our work and how to contact us
 * Include release notes with every release and send minor+ release summaries out to the following mailing lists:
 * wikitech-l
 * design.public
 * Document technical decisions about the library in the ADRs section.

Task tracking
Work on the library is tracked on the Design-Systems-Team workboard in Phabricator."I want to know the status of something"Check the workboard to see if a task exists for that work. If so, the task will be in the column that represents its current status. If not, you can create a task (see below) or contact us."I want to request a feature"You are welcome to create new tasks with the  and   tags. New tasks will go into our backlog column and will be triaged regularly. Please remember that Codex is maintained by a nonprofit—we won't be able to meet all feature requests, and it might take time to get to your request."I want to follow parts of your work"Create a Phabricator account and add yourself as a subscriber to a task to get notified when updates are made."I want to contribute to a task"Great! Create or claim a task as soon as you decide to work on it. This will help avoid overlapping, duplicate, or conflicting work. If you're creating a task, add as much detail as you can about the scope of the task: for example, what needs to be completed before the task can be considered "done"?

Team

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


 * Sarai Sánchez, UX & Product designer (team member from Wikimedia Deutschland)