IRS Digital Design System
The Story
Description
The IRS Digital Design System is a collection of UX guidance materials comprised of the Online Design Guide (ODG), a web-based toolbox that provides IRS stakeholders, designers, and developers guidance on best practices, design standards, and a component library to create digital products; and the UI Kit is a sketch-based toolkit that contains reusable stencils and templates for designers to create designs aligned to current ODG specifications.
Challenge / Goal
Identify and align widespread enterprise needs to create a series of scalable and comprehensive guidance materials that support the creation of unified experiences across all IRS digital experiences.
Plan
Identified widespread efforts and stakeholders, conducted scoping and workflow exercises, formulated outreach efforts, and conducted market analysis of prototyping tools for the design portion of the Solution Stack.
Role:Analyst, Facilitator, and Visual DesignerResponsibility:Team Lead | Creative and Strategic Direction
Explore
Constructed guiding principles, iterated on primary elements (design specs.), and initiated the UI Kit (low and high-fidelity stencils) to share with stakeholders. Additonal efforts included selecting the tech stack and setting up the original Component Library which was driven by the development team.
Role:Leadership, UI / UX DesignerResponsibility:Team Lead | Creative and Strategic Direction
Establish
Created the operational process, communication efforts (e.g., Design Council, and Brown Bags)to inform stakeholders, and tracking efforts to drive the initiative and stakeholder alignment of priorities.
Role:Leadership, UI / UX Designer and UX StrategistResponsibility:Team Lead | Creative and Strategic Direction
Measure
All ODG elements are prioritized and informed by user testing efforts (35+ total elements, 15 are 508 approved, and 10 are user tested). The team concludes each Sprint with a celebration and retro. 14 IRS digital products now align and leverage the Design System and specifications. Additionally, the team conducted 29 stakeholder interviews with designers, developers, product managers, and business owners to better understand their needs and behavior when using the tools.
Role:Leadership, UX StrategistResponsibility:Team Lead | Creative and Strategic Direction/span>