At the end of last year, the GOV.UK Design System passed the live assessment and officially became a live service.

Becoming a ‘live‘ service shows that the GOV.UK Design System is a mature, sustainable product that our users can rely on, and it will continue to be iterated and improved upon. It hasn’t dramatically changed what the team’s been doing, though it reassures us that we’re building our product in the right way. The live assessment has been a great opportunity to have a panel of experts in their fields, our peers, review our work as it’s difficult to see the whole picture when you’re working in the thick of it. It also gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we’ve developed the GOV.UK Design System.

Getting to live status represents the hard work the team, both past and present, have put into the GOV.UK Design System over the years. Both the team and the GOV.UK Design System have evolved and now is a good time for us to reflect on what we’ve achieved so far — and what else is still to come.

What we learned from the live assessment?

While we were quietly confident in the product we’d built, we were also apprehensive as we prepared for the live assessment.

As it turns out, we did not pass our live assessment the first time. The assessment panel told us we did not meet the criteria in the Service Standard to ‘Define what success looks like and publish performance data‘. In particular, they identified gaps in how our team measured website usage, used data to complement qualitative research and improved our knowledge of the wider potential market.

We were definitely disappointed, but the