What makes a good contribution?
Framing your contribution as a hypothesis helps us build an evidence base
Hypotheses are a way to document the design process so that what you learn is shareable and useful, to the DWP Design System team and to anyone working on government services.
To enable us to use your contribution we need you to:
- Start with a hypothesis
- Test it with your users
- Report back what you learn
This level of contribution enables us to collate more and more insights and evidence, which eventually allows us to publish a standard with confidence.
Widespread use of hypotheses creates a shared language amongst designers, researchers, product, and delivery and enables them to talk about problems in the same way.
Building an evidence base for standards
When there is not yet enough evidence to establish a standard, we do desk research (secondary research) based on insights from teams within DWP and other government departments. We also refer to research and examples from non-government and private organisations.
We share our hypotheses and speculative designs so that other teams benefit from a head start, publishing the insights and evidence we have collated so far.
This means we rely on designers to bring their hypotheses to us when they work on the same problems we are researching — to tell us what they observed, what they tried, and what the outcome was. That's how we build a body of evidence robust enough to make recommendations with confidence.
Get support
Need help implementing this in a prototype or production build? Get support from the Design System team.
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