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
"Reading my company’s ESG report overwhelmed me with words I didn’t understand but was crucial for knowing where to focus."
Sara ConklinA UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility
June 26, 2025
"We didn’t have the maturity of the practice itself to specify the impacts of losing design ops until it happened."
Benjamin RealShowing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
October 21, 2020
"Community input is invaluable in crafting solutions that work for everyone."
Lena ShenkarenkoCollaborative Wireframing for Creating Team Alignment and Shipping Better Products
October 21, 2020
"Knowledge management solutions must focus on both the explicit knowledge that can be documented and the tacit knowledge that resides in people’s experiences."
Maria TaylorKnowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org
October 3, 2023
"Our job as innovation managers is to build the playgrounds where people play—designing the built environment to complement policy and sustain future generations."
Liz EbengoThe Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
December 4, 2024
"Collaboration helps you look at problems from different angles, which makes your work more robust and nuanced."
Roberta Dombrowski Sam Duong WoloszynskiMaking Research a Team Sport
March 11, 2022
"Design.md is not technical specs but a document that you can give to AI to instruct what it actually builds."
Rikki TeetersConcept to code: Transforming ideas into functional products with Kiro
June 10, 2026
"Inclusion is an opportunity to build relationships rather than create division."
Saara Kamppari-MillerTheme Three Intro
September 9, 2022
"Handwritten notes have no boot up time, and that immediacy helps enter deeper flow states."
Jorge ArangoThe Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)
April 5, 2024
