The ECL v3 is the Commission's design system, created with a set of guiding principles that followed throughout the process.
By following a user-centred design approach, the ECL is the result of in-depth research into the users' needs and goals, offering solutions that are assessed, tested and revised continuously.
These solutions are then standardised to offer:
- vocabulary: a centralised UI promotes a shared understanding of components & terminology and thus fostering a collaborative flow across the organisation, regardless of discipline. This allows us to focus more on delivering, and less on back-and-forth communications
- consistency: increase page performance by decreasing design inconsistencies. By offering our users layouts, components, symbols (icons) and general visual properties they are already familiar with, a consistent design system will decrease confusion and learning curves, while offering predictable patterns of user experience with recognisable interactions
- re-usability and flexibility: already existing UI sub-components pieces can be reused to roll out new features or rearranged into new components. A flexible and adaptable system to the future needs of the organisation that simplifies the processing of requesting components features, fixing bugs and improving documentation
- accessibility: given our broad audience, our content needs to be accessible to everyone. For this reason ECL follows inclusive design principles, regardless of ability, environment or situation