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Welcome to the California Digital covid19 Response wiki!

This will help highlight guidance documents that show how we work and it extends from the Alpha design principles. Design principles help teams and stakeholders to align on design vision and decision-making. They give us a shared understanding to help us prioritize our next steps.

For our design principles, we are leveraged the proven work and best practices of teams like 18F, USDS, and the UK Government Digital Services.

The Alpha.CA.gov design principles include:

• Start with user needs
• Do less
• Design with data, research, intuition, and experimentation. (We added “research, intuition and experimentation” for a few reasons. Data doesn’t always tell the whole story. We also need user research, experimentation and, yes, our own intuition as users and Californians to inform design.)
• Do the hard work to make it simple and elegant
• Iterate — then iterate again
• Make it accessible and inclusive. (GOV.UK went with “This is for everyone.” We adapted it to make it more explicit and reflect California.)
• Understand context
• Build digital services, not websites
• Be consistent but not uniform
• Make things open: It makes things better
• Prioritize security, respect privacy (Something new we added to the list. A recognition of how incredibly important both security and privacy are.)
• Optimize performance (Another new one. Slow load times cost people money. That’s an accessibility and equity issue.)

These principles will inform our product design. And we’ll continue to iterate and refine them as we learn by doing.

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Summary

In this wiki you will find:

• Crisis standard
• Design Principles and style guide
• Inclusivity considerations
• Content style guide

Resources

• GOV.UK Government Design Principles
• 18F Design Principles
• Alpha.ca.gov handbook