Rosenverse
Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts

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
Yoel Sumitro
Actions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jason Mesut
Unmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Lavy Kumar
Future of Work
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Greg Petroff
Everything is About to Change: Software as Material
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Feleesha Sterling
Building a Rapid Research Program
2023 • Enterprise Community
Doug Powell
Closing Keynote: Design at Scale
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Roberta Dombrowski
5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Expanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
2023 • Enterprise Community
Alla Weinberg
Healing Toxic Stress
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Founder’s Welcome
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Denise Jacobs
Interactive Keynote: Social Change by Design
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
John Calhoun
Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Broad Strokes: Connecting Design, Research, and AI to the World Around Us
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Michelle Morrison
Culture Design
2020 • DesignOps Community
Jemma Ahmed
Democratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Jack Behar

"Using Merge we’re closing the loop of documentation and empowering stakeholders to communicate via common jargon and components."

Jack Behar

How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product

December 6, 2022

Dan Willis

"When I let my outside interest in, I suddenly had really memorable conversations with people."

Dan Willis

Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

June 3, 2019

Sam Proulx

"Assistive technology includes software and hardware that people with disabilities use to access computers."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

June 9, 2021

Dave Malouf

"Inclusive design and accessibility need to move to the forefront with much more intentionality in how we work."

Dave Malouf Patrizia Bertini Jon Fukuda

The Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 2)

April 28, 2022

David Eisner

"The engineering environment is a huge first hurdle — running and maintaining the local app can block designers."

David Eisner Changying (Z) Zheng Amelia Wattenberger Elyse Holladay

From prototype to production: Vibe coding design for real engineering systems

June 10, 2026

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"Seeing the dots connected so clearly reminded me why I was doing what I was doing."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Victor Udoewa

"The pace of radical participatory research must match the pace of availability, trust, and relationship."

Victor Udoewa

Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes

March 9, 2022

Chris Govias

"We need to follow the policy because that was the thing that created so many roadblocks."

Chris Govias Mai-Ling Garcia Emily Lessard

Perspectives on Civic Design

September 23, 2021

Ali Jeffery

"Technology is a tool, not a solution in itself; it needs human input."

Ali Jeffery Sheri Chudow

How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely

October 22, 2020