Government of Yukon transactional service components and design patterns

Overview

In 2015. I became the first employee of eServices for Citizens, a new central branch in Government of Yukon. Its mission was and remains to build and deliver simpler, clearer and faster digital services. One of my first tasks was to establish a library of reusable components and design patterns for the many new transactional services we were going to make.

Prototypes

With the assistance of a vendor, I created three different prototypes that all used Drupal's version of the Web Experience Toolkit known as Drupal WxT. This work allowed me to research and determine how different parts of government could use similar components and patterns to create a more consistent service experience, but serve different user and business needs.

Components

Working on services that included payment, information requests and registration renewals gave me a broad set of problems to solve. There were enough differences between these transactional services that I could find the limits of each and come up with a small library of reusable, accessible components for forms, navigation, guidance, messages and other user interface elements.

Patterns

Making the prototypes helped me extract different design patterns. Using the common components, I was able to develop best practice design solutions and produce clear, written guidance that people could follow when building services of their own. The patterns make use of one or several components that can adapt to different situations including pages, help and questions to users.

Today

The number of Government of Yukon's transactional service design patterns now total 14, all researched, developed, tested and iterated upon by our team. eServices, our vendors and colleagues built new digital services, the more we learned about what worked well, what had to improve and what patterns needed creation. The transactional service components and design patterns I established are now evolving to match the style, layout, spacing and typography of Yukon.ca.