FAQs

General

What’s a design system?

A design system is a collection of principles, components, patterns, and style guidelines offered as code, Sketch assets, and documentation. It helps increase efficiency, enable re-usability at scale, and helps maintain consistency between design and code.

How will you communicate new components and styles?

The team will use the following formats to keep partners and consuming teams informed:

  • Show & Tells (monthly)
    • For designers: Walkthroughs of new components and styles
    • For developers: Demos of new code and implementation tips
  • Pre-Planning Insight (quarterly; prior to pre-planning)
    • Management updates on available components
    • Our team targets for next PI
  • Newsletters (monthly)
    • Insight into team’s progress on components, larger initiatives, and roadmap refinements from Tom Scotto (Director, Enterprise Design System)

Who should we contact if we have ideas or questions?

Please use our Enterprise Digital Design System request form to:

  • Request new components
  • Suggest modifications to existing components
  • Point out issues with the UI Kit or Doc Site
  • Request training & assistance
  • Enter defect in components

Design

How will fonts be supported?

For web, the Enterprise Design System team works closely with the CVS Brand team to ensure the latest, brand-approved fonts are available. For iOS and Android, we rely on system fonts to ensure the highest levels of accessibility and dynamic type can be achieved.

Will the design system support dark mode?

Although we intend on supporting dark mode, this work has yet to be planned and scheduled.

Do you rely on iOS and Android conventions when designing for mobile?

Our goal is to align as closely as possible with mobile OS guidelines. When we start a new mobile component, we reference either Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and Google’s Material Design Guidelines to ensure we create a familiar experience for mobile users.

However, we also rely on the expertise from contributing UI design and development teams to ensure our components fit within the conventions used by these teams.

Will icons, pictograms, and illustrations be specific for Aetna and CVS or will there be a universal set across the entire enterprise?

The ultimate goal is to have a shared, universal set of icons and pictograms that will be available for both CVS- and Aetna-based products. Our team is working closely with Brand to ensure that icon and pictogram assets available on the CVS Health Brand Center will be available in the Enterprise Digital Design System as well.

However, these shared assets will roll out as follows:

  • At the start of PI1, Enterprise Digital Design System will have icons and illustrations available for Aetna-based products only
  • During PI1 and PI2, Enterprise Digital Design System will begin housing CVS icons and pictograms
  • In PI2, Enterprise Digital Design System will transition from two asset sets to a single, shared set of icons and pictograms

Will the Enterprise Design System team ever manage templates?

To serve both brands, the Enterprise Design System team will start by building and releasing atomic components to provide teams with enough ingredients to deliver features. Then the team will move on to larger components (molecules, organisms).

Depending on the needs of the organization and our ongoing partnerships with both Design and Engineering teams, we may move on to building templates. This work has yet to be defined or planned.

Development

How will repos and packages work across the organization?

Each platform will have a designated repository in the Enterprise Design System’s GitHub organization. These repositories will be accessible to any developer and will be available to contribute to in PI3 of 2021. Web components will be available via NPM packages, Android components will be available via Nexus, and iOS components will be available through Swift Package Manager.

Will we be utilizing Stencil for web components?

Yes. Enterprise Digital Design System currently uses Stencil to create web components, compile code and polyfills, as well as many helper functions.

Will web components be consumable in any framework?

Yes. Web components will be consumable by any front end framework.

Which browsers are supported?

Web components are supported on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and IE11.

Which Android versions are supported?

We support Android 6.0 and later, and Marshmallow (API 23) and later.

Which iOS versions are supported?

We support the latest version of iOS, along with the two previous versions.

How does Enterprise Digital Design System handle versioning?

Each platform uses Semantic Versioning’s x.y.z versioning schema, where:

  • x - major version
  • y - minor version
  • z - patch number
    z will start at .0 when the major and/or minor version change.
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