Design Systems Team

Through engagement with WMF staff, partners and volunteers, the Design Systems Team develops an overarching strategy for design, engineering, and user experiences across Wikimedia's web products. We build and maintain 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.

Wikimedia Design System
A 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 it's easy to find, modify and create new parts. Our design system is grounded in a set of principles and guidelines for how to use the system in a consistent and effective manner. It is designed with web accessibility and internationalization by default, so product teams can focus on their strategic goals and rely on the design system to provide an equitable user experience.

Codex
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. See the Codex MediaWiki page for more information.

Foundational 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.

Roadmap
To view our full roadmap for FY21-22 and FY22-23, please see the Design Systems Team board in Phabricator. * We welcome all volunteer feedback, and review it on an ongoing basis. Requests will be prioritized following the Beta Release.

Contribution Guidelines
The design system's ability to scale and welcome all contributors depends on an organized intake model for feature requests.

Note: As we are in a testing phase, our intake model is in active development. Please follow the guidelines below to ensure that your request is received. We look forward to collaborating with you!

Making a Request
Please route all requests through Phabricator so they are visible to the team by creating a new task and applying the Design-Systems-Team tag.

We triage incoming requests every two weeks.

Communication Channels
Active Phabricator boards: WMF staff and contractors can reach us in the #design and #front-end channels in Slack (enquiries that turn into requests should be added to Phabricator by the requestor).
 * Design-Systems-Team is where our roadmap, intake requests, and backlog are tracked.
 * Design-Systems-Sprint is where our current active work is tracked.

Questions?
Please connect with us via our team email list at [mailto:design-systems-team-external@wikimedia.org design-systems-team-external@wikimedia.org].

Staff Members

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