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
"The car is probably one of the most negative technologies we’ve introduced at scale."
Dan HillDesigning for the infrastructures of everyday life
June 4, 2024
"A true design system must have a single source of truth in code."
Dawn ResselFull-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
June 9, 2016
"The best large language model is right under your nose: the human brain with 300,000 years of ancestral development."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Nick Fine Alexandra Jayeun Lee Greg Nudelman Bo WangHow UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
August 31, 2023
"Public sector work is about broadening your reach and delivering outcomes to everyone, not winning market share."
Louis Rosenfeld Lashanda Hodge Senongo Akpem Chris HodowanecBecoming a Civic Designer: Making the Move from Private to Public Sector
November 17, 2022
"Compensation in cash or something as close to cash as possible is the best way to go, but sometimes collective donations work better."
Sarah FathallahLessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
March 30, 2020
"Feature roadmaps are bad because over time coherent actions become noise."
Adam ThomasSurvival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
December 6, 2022
"There needs to be some sort of universal standard for sourcing or mapping how the knowledge was obtained."
Ren PopeBuilding Experiences for Knowledge Systems
June 6, 2023
"Self-report is not the end all; people often don’t know why they behave certain ways, especially regarding automatic motivations like deeply ingrained mental models."
Amy BucherHarnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths
March 12, 2025
"In 2023, design leaders were being restructured out and design relegated to a tactical, downstream function."
Doug PowellDesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
September 11, 2025
