Crafting a Design System for the Congressional Research Services

Background

The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Its collections include millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts. One of the library’s missions is to research inquiries made by members of Congress, which is carried out through the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis.

The Library of Congress is redesigning CRS.gov. As part of that process, they need to develop a Design System in Figma based on the CRS brand and the USWDS guidelines.* The design system would then be used to create high-fidelity mockups of key CRS.gov pages.

* USWDS (U.S. Web Design System) is a toolkit of principles, guidance, and code that makes it easier to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites.

To help LOC achieve this objective, our team worked on creating a detailed design system together with documentation. In addition, the team utilized the design system to create mockups of specific CRS pages and validate the design decisions through user research and evaluation.

Process

Adapting the design sprint

For this project, we took the Google Design Sprint framework, which is originally “a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” It consists of 5 stages corresponding to 5 weekdays: map, sketch, decide, prototype, and test.

To properly use the Design Sprint within the constraint of our course schedule, we adapted the framework into a 4-week process, in which the sketch and decide phases are condensed. Throughout this entire project, we conducted a total of 3 sprints.

Discovery

We first tried to understand the problem by interviewing stakeholders from LOC who have deep insights into CRS.gov. During the interviews, we discussed the challenges with CRS.gov’s current design, the state of the overall design process, and relevant constraints.

From our interviews, we discovered patterns related to the challenges with the current CRS.gov design:

• The current CRS.gov design is outdated and doesn’t meet contemporary web design best practices.

• The new CRS.gov design needs to follow the USWDS guidelines.

• The dense and complex information provided on CRS.gov needs to be presented in a readable and discoverable way.

• CRS.gov needs to convey a sense of high-quality service to its Congressional users.

To understand the workflows surrounding a design system, we also interviewed 2 product designers and 1 front-end developer. We eventually created user journey maps for designer and developer personas to identify the major pain points as well as opportunities for the design system we were creating:

Based on the identified pain points, we developed opportunities that could be incorporated into our solution and voted on the most relevant points. For designers, we decided to focus on the following:

• Provide clear design principles with easily understandable wordings and a coherent structure to follow

• Offer more flexibility for designers when using the design system by providing alternative options and encouraging readers to use discretion when needed (research on examples)

• Clearly state different use cases of components and patterns in the documentation

For developers, we narrowed the opportunities down to:

• Create well-organized and easily readable documentation (e.g.: following alphabetical order, including table of contents)

• Make sure that documentation contains enough information about how/why/when to use components (include examples, do’s and don’ts)

• Maintain consistent organization in both Figma and Confluence that responds well to large amounts of new additions

Toward the end of the discovery process, with all of our findings from the steps taken, we identified the following goals that served as our north star throughout the project:

• Adapt the USWDS to the CRS brand in order to convey a sense of expertise through the CRS.gov design system

• Create a design library in Figma that is organized and easy to navigate

• Provide clear guidelines and relevant resources while ensuring readability in the design system documentation

• Validate and refine design choices through thorough benchmarking and user research

Researching Other Solutions

We conducted a comparative analysis to look at services that are similar to CRS.gov in terms of mission or functionality to find inspiration for our solutions: AEI, Aspen Institute, Brookings, CATO, and The Heritage Foundation. From our research, the most valuable finding we got was that websites offering similar solutions to CRS.gov have a much more modern, clean look, which is characterized by generous white space, contemporary typography, and high-quality images.

To familiarize ourselves with design system best practices, we also looked at industry-standard systems such as the USWDS itself, Google Material Design, and Apple Human-Interface Guidelines. These explorations informed us on design system organization, usability recommendations, and accessibility guidelines.

Designing & Documenting

To start working on the CRS.gov design system, we first conducted a UI inventory on the current CRS.gov website to identify all the reusable UI elements that need to be included in the design system.

We decided to work on the design components and patterns using Figma while documenting them in Confluence.

• The Figma file houses the design library including typography styles, color palette, components, patterns, and templates.

• The Confluence space provides documentation on specs, usage, usability, and accessibility guidelines. These two living documents offer intuitive navigation and a clear presentation of information throughout the design system.

As we started building out the design system from the most basic elements to more complex ones, we frequently communicated with our client in order to get their feedback, while simultaneously conducting internal critique sessions to give each other pointers.