Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
Summary
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
"Shared digital whiteboards are a game changer because stickies don’t fall off the wall and they enable collaborative design thinking remotely."
Wendy Johansson Surya VankaDesign at Scale: Behind the Scenes
April 29, 2021
"Imagine your entire design team seeing what everyone else is doing with all deliverables in one place, removing silos."
Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank DeshpandeIntroduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
September 8, 2022
"Most research presentations bury recommendations under methods; we must lead with what decisions to make."
Aras Bilgen Ari ZelmanowResearch Democratization: A Debate
March 29, 2023
"Now everyone’s an edge case, so research needs to focus on those edge cases, not just the average user."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"We don’t want product teams doing research just to check a box—they need to own and act on the insights."
Todd Healy Jess GrecoDriving Change with CX Metrics
June 7, 2023
"Situational use cases help us consider the realities outside the business problem that impact user success."
Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis MorinSpace for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens
June 10, 2021
"The people doing the research are human, and the people we want to learn from are human."
Steve PortigalWar Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
March 30, 2020
"Trust is built not just in big moments but in little marbles filling a jar over time."
Etienne FangThe Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership
March 10, 2021
"The enterprise feels like a big elephant; different people touch different parts and argue what it really is."
Dave GrayLiminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
May 14, 2015
