Design System Team/Vision

Vision Statement

To provide a comprehensive, reusable, extensible way to design and build front ends on Wikimedia platforms, by following a universal style guide and a shared development kit that codifies the visual and experience principles and guidelines in a library of user-interface (UI) components.

Mission

Our mission is to develop an overarching strategy for front-end design and engineering across Wikimedia. This includes building and maintaining a design system that provides 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 front-end features across Wikimedia with consistency and ease.

Current vs. Future

Current state of front-end 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 front-end development

Less feature redundancy
Consistent user experience across all Wikimedia projects
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