A design library is a collection of reusable bits and components. This helps organisations to develop websites quickly and consistently. It also makes it easier to comply to standards.
This post focuses on our design work with the Victorian Mental Health Tribunal. I’ve also talked about the research side of this project at UX Australia 2019 – Designing for people in crisis.
The Mental Health Tribunal (MHT) is a small organisation and their website is supported by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). We researched and redesigned their website, leveraging the DHHS design library. This helped ensure that the design was fully compliant with DHHS standards and was ready to build.
Using the design library allowed us to focus deeply on designing a compelling content experience for users. We could also spend more time on designing functional components.
Consistency and standards-compliance are critical in government interaction with citizens online. This is stressed in numerous research reports and is evident throughout the Victorian Government’s digital standards. It has led the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and agencies like DHHS, to invest heavily in detailed and robust design libraries, that make the user experience simpler and more compelling.
For MHT we created a unique design based on the DHHS design library. The design was enhanced for use on multiple screen sizes. We also provided a detailed online style guide that made it easy for developers to code. This meant that during the build the developers only needed to refer one question back to us.
The result of our work is a strongly user-focused Tribunal website that’s simpler for the tribunal team to manage and enhance.