Group 2 Discussion - Natural language

[patrickpatrickpatrick]

Discussion for Group 2 of the Design System Hack Day - Linking Design Systems

[murrlipp]

Reasons for choosing:

• Tied into discoverability. Would like to focus on the user needs - i.e. 'I want to alert a user to something' rather than 'I want to use a notification'.
• Making the naming of components and patterns more understandable - i.e. some people say dropdown, some people say 'select'.
• Confusion between the name of the component and a specific HTML attribute.
• To help solve the problem for people who are not designers, to break the jargon. They don't know what to search for.
• What would you search for if you didn't know how a certain design system has named their component?
• To help with people in international contexts. In such a huge context, if you don't know what you don't know, how do you search for it?
• Also benefits new joiners in teams in instances where there are specific terms used.

[murrlipp]

How might we...

• Communicate to people who want to solve a user problem with a design system component or pattern, what user need the component or pattern solves.
• Make this discoverable across all departmental design systems.

[murrlipp]

Thoughts from the IRL group:

--

GOV.UK and most other design systems DO have a sentence on component pages that accurately summarises what user need is met by the component, but this isn't at the forefront so people still need to scroll through all of the components to find the one they need.

We want to make the process of searching for a relevant component pattern easier by introducing an LLM-fed search pattern on the GOV.UK Design System website (https://design-system.service.gov.uk/)

This would allow users to enter a natural language search query such as 'I want to alert a user to an important piece of information', and they would see a search results page showing relevant components for the user need they have entered.

An extension to this could be that the search results could also include other design systems - for discoverability.

--

ChatGPT does this, so could it be integrated into GOV.UK?

[murrlipp]

A mockup of what a search results page might look like:

[murrlipp]

Summary

Exploring: Use of natural language to describe components

Why?

• Tied into discoverability. Would like to focus on the user needs - i.e. 'I want to alert a user to something' rather than 'I want to use a notification'.
• Making the naming of components and patterns more understandable - i.e. some people say dropdown, some people say 'select'.
• To help solve the problem for people who are not designers, to break the jargon. They don't know what to search for.
• What would you search for if you didn't know how a certain design system has named their component?
• To help with people in international contexts. In such a huge context, if you don't know what you don't know, how do you search for it?
• Also benefits new joiners in teams in instances where there are specific terms used.

Concept

GOV.UK and most other design systems have a sentence on component pages that accurately summarises what user need is met by the component, but this isn't at the forefront so people still need to scroll through all of the components to find the one they need.

GOV.UK recently updated the search bar on their main site to allow more searches in more natural language.

We want to make the process of searching for a relevant component pattern easier by introducing an LLM-fed search pattern on the GOV.UK Design System website (https://design-system.service.gov.uk/)

This would allow users to enter a natural language search query such as 'I want to alert a user to an important piece of information', and they would see a search results page showing relevant components for the user need they have entered.

An extension to this could be that the search results could also include other design systems - for discoverability.

Mockup

[ImranH-GDS]

Hello, we have about 30 minutes left. Can each group/ subgroup think about who will play back your ideas during the show and tell?

[designwithcal]

Hello from the other side. We've been busy sketching out a few wireframes of a solution. It's all on Figma here: https://www.figma.com/board/9HMSap9Ec50uqGzfshDQcv/Group-2---Natural-Language?node-id=0-1&t=oPnECoslcBZUDtlO-1