Rosenverse

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
Matt Duignan
Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Kristin Skinner
Theme 2: Introduction and Provocation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
Frameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Chris Hodowanec
Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Kristin Skinner
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sean Dolan
A Practical Look at Creating More Usable Enterprise Customer Journeys
2019 • Enterprise Community
Carol Smith
Operationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Alastair Simpson
Debunking the Myths of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Tatyana Mamut
Opening Keynote: Breaking Conway's Law--or How to Work Differently and Not Ship Your Org Chart
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Renee Reid
Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Brenna Fallon
Learning Over Outcomes
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Yolanda Rankin
Black Feminist Epistemology as a Critical Framework for Equitable Design
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold

More Videos

Shreya Dhawan

"We should break with the concept of projects and embrace change management over time to advance service design."

Shreya Dhawan Victor Udoewa Xènia Viladas Florian Vollmer

Making service tangible: the fastest path to higher performance

November 19, 2025

Dan Willis

"The harder I think, the further I am from the answer."

Dan Willis

Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

May 13, 2015

Alla Weinberg

"Without safety, human beings literally can’t think."

Alla Weinberg

How to Build and Scale Team Safety

January 8, 2024

Sam Proulx

"Frequent, bite-sized training is crucial so staff actually remember how to support customers with disabilities."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

John Maeda

"Money is not an evil thing. Creative people should accept that money is okay."

John Maeda

Making Sense of Enterprise UX

June 9, 2016

Angy Peterson

"Personalization at scale is made possible by capturing activity data and correlating it across millions of residents."

Angy Peterson Bob Ainsbury

More Than Technology: Personalized Public Sector Experiences

December 10, 2021

Peter Van Dijck

"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 Dijck

Hands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge

October 15, 2025

Jon Fukuda

"Z’s approach to governing AI in design ops will give us all food for thought as we navigate the future."

Jon Fukuda

Theme 3 Intro

September 25, 2024

George Hinchliffe

"The drag-and-drop UI builder frees engineers to focus on backend data integration while designers create and tweak layouts."

George Hinchliffe Joy Liu

Delivering Amazing Experiences

June 10, 2021