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Design principles
Principles to follow when designing and building National Archives services.
Contents
Showcase professionalism
- Avoid using cheesy graphics, generative AI, stock photography, icons and unnecessary animation to add visual interest.
- Enable more support for technologies that allow a pure browsing experience such as reader modes.
- Follow editorial and content guidelines and don't rely on AI to write copy.
- Don’t write titles that look like clickbait.
- Provide links and references to trusted sources.
Grow trust
- Respect the user's choices, including their preference to remain anonymous.
- Track only with explicit consent and assume an incognito browsing experience is needed unless beneficial to the user to offer otherwise.
- Give users full control and place them in the driving seat.
- Provide transparency about the use of data.
- Clearly declare where and how AI has been used.
Include everyone
- Design and build services that support everyone.
- Don’t limit inclusion to a checkbox exercise of WCAG compliance.
- Consider users without access to the latest technologies.
- Add simple introductions and explanations for non-expert users.
- Avoid using product names that don’t properly describe the service.
Think forwards
- Where possible, build services that can be more easily updated or replaced.
- Split complex functionality up into discrete services or pages.
- Explore and use new technologies as an enhancement but plan for their obsolescence.
- Push small, incremental updates often rather than large changes less frequently.
- Plan for the future and create content and structure under URLs that will stand the test of time.
Build robustness
- Design services that can work in any network conditions and optimise for performance.
- Consider users that have limited access.
- Where possible, make page URLs sharable and stateless.
- Be wary of relying on third party services and prepare for situations when they might not be reachable.
- Build services that inspire confidence.