Dan Cabral
UX/UI Designer,
Harvard University
Dealing ACES: Toward an Accessible, Communal, Empowering, and Sustainable Design System
Wednesday, April 02, 2025 | 8:30AM–9:15AM ET | Room 552 AB
Session Type:
Breakout Session
Delivery Format:
Presentation/Panel Session
In a yearslong project, Harvard is building a new web publishing platform and migrating thousands of sites from an aging, out-of-date environment to a newly designed Drupal platform. As part of this undertaking, our user experience team is building a design system to support accessibility and design requirements on the new platform. Join us as we discuss: (1) our purpose and goals for establishing a people-first design system to support our next generation web publishing platforms; (2) how our accessible, communal, empowering, and sustainable principles inform project activities, including requirements elicitation, feature prioritization, and design system governance and evolution; (3) the key role of design reviews, accessibility testing, and evaluative user research?including people with disabilities?in creating accessible and usable design system components; (4) how engaging with stakeholders and users is instrumental as we evolve the design system to support the community’s current and future web publishing needs and goals; and (5) how we work across teams and with vendors to focus on accessibility from the very start of the project.
