Standardising components sounds like a good way to improve efficiency and safety but I imagine if it is done badly it could do the opposite.
I’m always skeptical of big government initiatives, so I am interested to hear how those in the know grade the gov in this example.
gov.uk nailed this, and it makes their website very pleasant to use. They share a lot of their UX research so it benefits a lot of other people including myself.
I'm also a big fan of writing guides that teach people to write simply and clearly. It's sorely missing where I live.
This? https://www.mcmaster.com/
On desktop, sure. But they don't work in mobile. And that's easily 80% of the troubles of modern design: to avoid building everything twice, today people write "responsive", "mobile first" websites that, on desktop, tend to have an excessive amount of whitespace and other issues (see for example the old vs new reddit layout)
What's being demanded of websites in 2023 is just much more difficult to do well than what people wanted in 2010.
In extreme cases of very large products whose owners want them to look exceedingly modern it can be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: by the time they finish implementing the last components and icons, the ones that were implemented at the beginning of the project are already due for an update.
The job security simply isn't worth the maddening repetition.
/you may get the impression I'm bitter.
(btw your solution is needlessly complicated and way too much hard work - easier to sit with the client, exhale deeply then say "A full redesign? Thats quite a big project and its a lot of work, are you sure?" offer a fixed rate contract assuming 100's or even 1000's of person-hours and deliver (after a polite overrun of a few weeks) the updated css.)
/you may get the impression I'm bitter and cynical.
it's not my solution, it's the solution I'm suffering through because our styling, as determined by external company, is handled via Chakra UI meaning that redesign requires JS work.
Also many of the interactions with governmental digital services happen only once a year. I've been in helpdesk supporting people on a webapp with an obnoxious interface that they had to use 3 to 4 times a year to fulfill their project report in order to get paid for their project work. The UX was so out of the conventions that people hated it with passion and I had to help the laggards to use the application.
you might pull an off-the-shelf component library for a demo app or even a startup, but the value of building in-house/from-scratch in government, especially military, cannot be understated. the web ui ecosystem is rife with security risks and accessibility footguns.
it looks fine to me. it's a design system, not rocket science.