---
# System prepended metadata

title: FAQ
tags: [About]

---

---
title: FAQ
tags: About
---

# US Pharma Drupal Design System FAQ

### What is the US Pharma Drupal Design System?
The US Pharma Design System is a set of standards to manage design for Novartis US Pharma DTC and HCP websites on Drupal by creating a shared language and visual consistency. This allows us to reduce website design and build costs, create websites faster, achieve more reliable web performance benchmarks for SEO, and provide better digital experiences for HCPs and patients.

### Who can use the design system?
The design system is intended to be used for creating branded and unbranded DTC and HCP marketing websites at US Pharma. The design system guidelines contained in this website can be used by a variety of teams: 
1. Brand teams -- to understand the available features on Drupal and help drive digital strategy
2. Agency design teams -- to guide design for Drupal website projects 
3. MAP reviewers -- to ensure that submitted websites adhere to above-brand guidelines
4. Drupal developers & content editors -- to understand current US Pharma Drupal capabilities and guide in the use of the CMS
5. Content strategists -- to guide content creation and UX planning for Drupal website projects

### Why has Integrated Marketing settled on the use of a single design system for all websites on the CMS platform?
This model offers two primary strategic advantages to our teams:

1. Standardizing web experiences under the leadership of a dedicated internal team allows us to ensure proper user-centered research informs UX decisions and that all experiences are validated with users. A central system ensures that our websites always meet SEO best practices and web accessibility benchmarks and provides multiple teams (such as tagging and MLR teams) with opportunities to become more agile. All of this will increase our website performance, speed to market, and agility in evolving as digital behaviors change over time.   

3. Each individual website component created in the design system will provide repeatable value for all of our brands, which allows us to unlock economies of scale. Any time new components or features are added to the system, they become available to all website owners. This will reduce website creation costs and level of effort considerably, by reducing technical debt, parallel work, and reliance on vendors. 

### How do you know the design system will improve our users' experiences on the web?
No research or UX approach can guarantee a lift in website engagement, as content strategy plays an equally heavy role impacting user behavior. Working with users to ensure we meet their needs helps us create an optimal product they will want to use. We strive to back up all strategy and design decisions with user research insights to ensure we avoid assumptions about user needs and are able to learn and adapt over time. This strategy: 

* enables us to create designs that are valuable to users and efficient to use
* ensures users can complete tasks without making errors
* decreases the learning curve of using our websites
* helps us to understand the ROI of our UX design
* validates (or shatters) assumptions and hypotheses we may have about our customers
* allows us to experiment and learn from experiments to continually improve

### Why does my site need to be accessible? And how can I tell if it is?
By making your website accessible, you are ensuring that all of your potential users, including people with disabilities, have a good user experience and are able to easily access your information.  By implementing accessibility best practices, you are also improving the usability of the site for all users. Your site also receives SEO benefit by adhering to these guidelines.

It is a legal requirement at Novartis that all websites meet [WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/).

Our design system and Drupal capabilities will make it easier for designers to create fully accessible website experiences. However, the ultimate responsibility lies with the website owner. The Novartis Web Platform team can support website projects with full accessibility scans, training, and other services.

### I don't see a feature I need for my brand's website. How can I get a new feature onto the CMS for our site?
Contact our support team to see the current features roadmap first, as we may be planning to release a similar or identical feature.

If the feature is not present in the roadmap, let the Content Support Team lead know, or reach out to your Digital Program Manager. The design system team stays looped into digital strategy initiatives at Integrated Marketing, which helps drive the roadmap, but new and useful feature ideas are always welcomed as candidates to be added to the roadmap.

That said, not all features will be appropriate candidates for the Drupal roadmap. They must be validated to be of significant above-brand business value and meet several business criteria, including user-centered market justification to ensure we are building the right experiences for our customers.

### How do I know when new features will be added to the Drupal Design System?
The Drupal Product Team will regularly communicate updates to the product roadmap through the Content Support Team and Digital Program Managers. The team works in agile so items further in the roadmap are subject to delivery timing changes. Teams working within the Drupal product can expect regular enhancements and new features throughout the year. In 2022, we expect to build core web capabilities. Starting in 2023, we will be introducing more advanced features and enhancements.

### I found an issue with a component, who can I contact to help?
Please contact your Content Support Team lead who will be able to assist with reporting and/or resolving the problem.

### I noticed that the design documentation differs from what I'm able to do in Drupal. What's the correct information?
Periodically, there will be discrepancies between the documentation repository on this website and the feature requirements available in the Drupal CMS. We try to keep these issues to a minimum, but please report them to your Content Support Team lead who can help clarify issues and ensure they are corrected in the documentation.

In a few cases, Drupal will allow you to do more than the documentation states, such as the number of images allowed in a photo gallery. In these cases, our documentation provides a recommendation to ensure that the design doesn't "break" from having more content / unexpected content within it or that website performance is not negatively impacted. 

### What browsers are supported?
The design system was built mobile first and all website components function responsively. Front end code was built using React. This means that we support a wide variety of mobile devices and browsers across multiple screen sizes. Details of the responsiveness can be found in the Grid and Breakpoints section of our documentation. We  test our design system to be functional on the following browsers:

* Windows 10 - Chrome 91+
* Windows 10 - MS Edge 91+
* Windows 10- Firefox 91+
* Mac OS Big Sur - Safari 14
* Samsung Galaxy S10 - Chrome
* iPad 8 - Safari
* iPhone XS - Safari (latest)
* iPhone X - Chrome (latest)
* iPhone 11 - Safari (latest)
* iPhone 11 - Chrome (latest)
* iPhone 12 Mini - Safari (latest)
* iPhone 12 Max Pro - Safari (latest)



 
