Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
Gold
Thursday, November 17, 2022 • Civic Design 2022
Share the love for this talk
Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
Speakers: Shawna Hein and Kevin Hoffman
Link:

Summary

At a large U.S. federal agency, we've partnered across agency personnel, vendors, and contracts to build a single design culture that delivers an exceptional customer experience while meeting evolving business needs. We’ve built collaboration and critique rituals, tooling approaches, and design governance processes to organize 75+ designers into a unified practice all working together on a single, digital experience. We'll share what worked, what didn't, and provide a set of principles and tactics you can use right away – in any government agency – to begin building your own cohesive design practice, even when your ecosystem is anything but cohesive.

Key Insights

  • Centralizing research participant recruitment and documentation streamlines user access for multiple contract teams, improving research quality and inclusivity.

  • Collaboration across contractor boundaries is critical and can be facilitated by shared communication tools like Slack and regular cross-team meetings.

  • Normalizing design tools and processes across contractors ensures consistency, speeds onboarding, and prevents duplicated effort in maintaining design systems.

  • A governance-driven collaboration cycle with strict adherence to accessibility and user experience standards is required to launch VA digital applications.

  • Making design work and patterns visible early prevents redundant efforts and clarifies which user problems are already addressed.

  • Dedicated centralized expert teams in accessibility, content, IA, and QA free designers to specialize and maintain quality in large-scale enterprise projects.

  • Legal constraints, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, limit research interactions, requiring balancing ethical concerns with agile user research.

  • Contracts structured around individual products rather than whole user experiences create challenges in coordination and require extra collaborative effort.

  • Fostering psychological safety and informal feedback venues enables design teams from multiple companies to share work openly and improve outcomes.

  • The VA’s approach has led to millions of veterans using self-service tools monthly, highlighting the impact of cohesive government design practices.

Notable Quotes

"Throwing a potluck sounds easy until you realize you don’t have a group that magically reads each other’s minds, resulting in a random table of snack foods."

"Our digital experience group acts like hosts and planners making sure veterans sit down to a cohesive, inclusive meal, not just disparate dishes."

"We have over 30 contracting teams spread across roughly 10 vendors all working on parts of the veteran experience landscape."

"A government designer aims to reduce UX variation while a contractor may optimize only their single product, creating potential conflicts."

"Reliable access to veterans and other users is fundamental to running quality, inclusive research across many teams and products."

"Slack channels and weekly meetings encourage cross-contract collaboration, avoiding duplication and sharing learnings across teams."

"The collaboration cycle requires following standards for accessibility, content, design system usage, and IA or you don’t launch your product."

"We treat our shared tooling and design system as a product with a dedicated team maintaining reusable components and governance."

"Designers contribute experimental patterns back to the design system early, making their work visible even before full validation."

"We’ve seen self-service tool usage grow from hundreds to millions of veterans served monthly after launching a unified VA platform."

Ask the Rosenbot
Dawn Ressel
Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Kim Holt
A Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Clemens Janssen
Efficiently Scaling Research as a Team of One
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
John Calhoun
Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Welcome
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Natalia Radywyl
Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Enterprise Community
Nathan Curtis
Design Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough?
2019 • DesignOps Community
Alnie Figueroa
The Future of Design Operations: Transforming Our Craft
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Vicky Teinaki
Short Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
James Wieselman Schulman
Research is a team sport: advancing the work when everyone does the research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Liam Thurston
Why Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Husani Oakley
Theme Two Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Sean Fitzell
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold

More Videos

Audrey Crane

"Even teams with dedicated designers sometimes have gaps because designers get pulled to other priorities."

Audrey Crane

Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization?

April 20, 2023

Doug Powell

"Business leaders are super busy, data-driven, competitive, and have a finely tuned bullshit meter."

Doug Powell

Closing Keynote: Design at Scale

November 8, 2018

Bria Alexander

"Our job as civic designers is to bring government needs and community needs into alignment."

Bria Alexander Ariel Kennan Charlotte Lee Sarah Brooks Emily Lessard Gordon Ross Joanne Dong

Reflect and Chart Forward

December 10, 2021

Nova Wehman-Brown

"Developers had been designing the product for years and we didn’t recognize that we were taking something away from them they loved."

Nova Wehman-Brown

We've Never Done This Before

June 4, 2019

Dr. Jamika D. Burge

"Women are more likely to die in car crashes because crash test dummies are not designed with women in mind."

Dr. Jamika D. Burge Mansi Gupta

Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices

September 15, 2022

Amy Parness

"I was able to create user segments to analyze sustainability-related user journeys and identify gaps."

Amy Parness

Scaling Sustainability: Complementary strategies that drive long-term success

May 29, 2025

Abbey Smalley

"The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed – Dave Maloof, highlighting uneven UX maturity and design ops adoption."

Abbey Smalley

Today’s Design Ops and Programs Landscape & Career Paths

October 4, 2023

Alexandra Schmidt

"Technology moves faster than policymaking — that’s the pacing problem we need to address."

Alexandra Schmidt

Why Ethics Can't Save Tech

November 18, 2022

Russ Unger

"Onboarding isn’t a single event or process, it’s an ecosystem with many touchpoints impacting the new employee experience."

Russ Unger

Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought

November 7, 2017