Our 3 Guiding Principles for Digital Product Development
Everything we produce must be responsive, accessible, and performant.
Recently, the Chief Digital Officer for the state of Georgia wrote about the 4 tenets we focus on for Georgia’s web presence, putting:
- Problem first in the strategy process
- People first in the discover process
- Context first in the planning process
- Content first in the design process
These tenets make their way into all our individual website projects for each agency, but they also strongly inform our enterprise platform and product strategy, as well.
A while back I wrote about how we prioritize enhancements to our enterprise web platform, and highlighted some of the enhancements on our roadmap.
We prioritize improvements that will:
- Put end-users first
- Support our content managers
- Be usable over the long term horizon
- Provide the best value for our time and money
Even still, when we’re making improvements, some of our enhancement initiatives are broader than others.
Targeted Improvements, and Broad Initiatives
When we launch a new content type (such as Locations) or a new content layout format (such as Columns), that improvement will affect some customers and some web pages, and make it easier to perform certain tasks. Those are targeted improvements, and are scoped and prioritized as such.
Other improvements take the form of a broader initiative. These signify a change in focus across the entire platform — affecting all visitors, whether they’re aware of it or not. These initiatives are often a response to a changing digital landscape, or a better understanding of our users, their challenges, and how they interact with digital content.
To that end, in the last few years of the platform, we’ve focused a larger part of our time and resources on enhancements to improve the platform as a whole, making it:
- Responsive (Mobile Friendly) — using responsive design methodologies to adjust the flow and size of elements depending on device width. This includes loading different image sizes and background variants based on device needs.
- Accessible to people with a broader range of disabilities, based on WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) standards.
- Performant — performance optimized, making improvements and adjustments to theme elements, image sizes, scripts, and caching to improve page load speed and decrease the total file sizes downloaded in each interaction.
None of this will be new to anyone who follows our work — we’ve talked about each of these initiatives at length. The important thing to keep in mind is that these broad initiatives don’t end when the project ends. Unlike a targeted improvement, each of these broad initiatives create a new requirement — or a principle — for all new work on the platform going forward.
Maintaining Focus on Core Development Principles
These principles, however, are surprisingly easy to forget in the broader context of working with external vendors for development and testing. Every time we set out to work on a new enhancement, we cannot simply assume that a new developer coming in will intuitively know the bar that’s been set for their work. So we’re asking for these principles to be built into the default design and development workflow for each vendor partner we work with.
By default, developers should build code that is responsive, accessible, and performant.
It can feel like a lot to keep track of at first, especially in the midst of the million other tasks swirling around, and the dozens of smaller projects.
We need to keep track of these principles:
- Within our team
- With our design and development partners
- With agency partners, both on and off the GeorgiaGov platform
So how do we keep these principles at top of mind?
Within our team, we build it into our processes. We write it down. Everywhere. Then at every milestone check, every step of any project before anything goes forward, we bring it up. And we added additional checkpoints to our acceptance testing and quality assurance reviews to make sure those standards are truly met.
Outside of our team, we ask development partners to build those principles into their workflows. We’re currently building these expectations into our procurement process, and we will only approve vendors who regularly develop to meet these checkpoints. We’ll write these principles into core expectations for any design or development work these partners are contracted to deliver.
And to address other agencies, we’re updating our statewide standards and guidelines to stress that all new digital products for the state meet these same standards — not just the ones that our team manages.
We write these principles down and bring them up time and time again. Because if we don’t, something gets missed. Every time.
These Principles Are Affected By Content, Too
While we maintain these 3 principles in our development process, we also must encourage our agency partners — those managing each site’s content — to make them a priority in their content as well.
Each of these principles is important not only in the code, but also in the content itself.
This is where we focus on outreach during and after each initiative, using outlets such as training sessions, GovTalks, and blog posts to point our agency partners to how they can bake these core principles into their content workflows.
Eventually this practice will become commonplace, and everyone will be doing it. Eventually we’ll hit a point where no one would even think to create a feature without thinking of the mobile layout and adding an alt text field for images. In an ideal world, these would be part of the default development workflow and testing processes.
Like anything, in order to build awareness and grow the skillsets, and in order to move these values from foreign ideas to subconscious behavior, we have to start with conversation.
An earlier version of this post was originally published August 23, 2016 on the Digital Services Georgia website.
Digital Services Georgia is a nonpartisan division of the Georgia Technology Authority. This publication does not entertain political discussions.
