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
"There’s this inflection point about how research work is done and what the system wants from knowledge workers."
Steve Portigal Alba Villamil Sam LadnerThe Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
July 29, 2021
"Service design does not have an answer for how to handle radically different user needs across communities."
Ron BronsonDesign, Consequences & Everyday Life
November 18, 2022
"False information spreads significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, often by an order of magnitude."
Mandy DrewWhat Role(s) Can Research Play in Responsible Design?
March 11, 2021
"You can refine your scope and run the analysis loop multiple times in one or two hours to explore an entire domain."
Joerg Beringer Thomas GeisScaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
June 10, 2025
"Cross-functional relationships often matter more to output than relationships within the immediate team."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Is gamification just last decade’s fad or have the principles become so ubiquitous we stopped calling it that?"
Cheryl PlatzEmbrace Your Fun Factor: Game Development Best Practices for Product Design
January 9, 2026
"We focused on recruiting both users who had poor and good experiences to ensure breadth of insight."
Jemma AhmedConvergent Research Techniques in Customer Journey Mapping
March 31, 2020
"Sometimes you just have to be a little bit bold and be willing to use your power and privilege to advocate for what you know to be true."
Emily Williams Nora FioreWhen UX Research and Institutional Racism Collide: A Case Study
March 12, 2021
"We realized designing for AI is very different from other computational mediums we used before."
Aras BilgenWho does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
June 10, 2025
