A top university’s first ever design system
The University of Maryland has over 1,300 websites. Built on different systems, templates, and technologies, everything about these sites is difficult to manage, and detrimental to a cohesive brand. As the UX and digital design lead for the university’s digital team, my team and I sought to create a design system that would address consistency and accessibility issues, as well as minimize design and technical debt.
Process: ever evolving
Development of the design system is an ongoing process. It started with taking an interface inventory of the existing university sites to determine the functionality and components we should standardize across properties.
The design style was largely based on the university’s existing brand guidelines, with needed adjustments to
allow a scalable and neutral framework that would be compatible with most of the university’s websites.
In addition, we had the job of selling the design system to other parts of the university. Presentations to stakeholders have been an important part of the work.
Documentation is (almost) everything
Our documentation site accounted for a lot of the hours spent by my team. We sought to create thorough documentation to outline component requirements and options, layout optimization, and best practices.
We endeavored to be a one-stop resource to answer questions for designers, developers and content editors, with plans to create more resources in the coming year.
Results that speak for themselves
Our team has successfully used the design system on several projects and it has been used on several projects outside our team as well to stand up websites much faster than had previously been possible.