Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Design systems has always been a beginning, like a seed, and design ops basically serves as the nurture."
George Abraham Stefan IvanovDesign Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)
September 30, 2021
"Building a customer empathy map with thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing quadrants helps teams understand different perspectives."
Ross SmithBreaking Barriers with Empathy
June 9, 2017
"Visual design quality actually affects perceived trustworthiness."
Daniel J. RosenbergDesigning with and for Artificial Intelligence
August 11, 2022
"When product teams proactively engage you early, instead of last minute, that’s a huge cultural shift indicating maturity."
Jules MonzaUse These Words and Count These Things
September 25, 2024
"Having a 'dope' leader who champions design ops changes everything."
Bud Caddell Kristin Skinner Alana WashingtonDesignOps Community Sensing Session
May 13, 2021
"Asynchronous communication allows us hours of deep and focused work."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"People who work in-house tend to be more satisfied with their salary compared to those on the agency side."
Marc FonteijnFirst Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
December 4, 2024
"Veterans don’t use the internet was the common excuse we heard, but that was simply not true."
Marina MartinLives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government
June 14, 2018
"LLMs don’t have memory, so rating on a scale from one to five is pretty random. Better to have yes or no answers."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
