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
"Facilitation is the grease between the wheels of difficult organizational challenges."
Alexandra SchmidtEnterprise UX Playbook
December 1, 2022
"Improv helps me be high energy and engaged in meetings, which others sometimes notice as 'winging it' fluidly."
Cheryl PlatzMerging Improv with Design
March 7, 2019
"Surprisingly, when nudging vaccines, consumers preferred seeing every eligible vaccine listed, even controversial ones like COVID-19."
Amy BucherHarnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths
March 12, 2025
"Mountain climbing feels like an appropriate metaphor to describe our practice because it takes agility, goal setting, and peripheral vision."
John CalhounHave we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
October 1, 2021
"Things are gonna get a lot worse before they get worse."
Steve Krug Louis RosenfeldDon’t Make Me Think 3.0: What Endures and What Evolves in UX
March 11, 2026
"I think the more that I’ve kind of been in this liminal space, the more I come to the conclusion that it’s a very human journey that people need to go on."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Jemma Ahmed Chris GeisonBridge Building across Research Disciplines
August 26, 2021
"Page limits will help equity and focus and level the playing field for small and large firms."
Emily LessardRFPs Without Tears: Writing Inclusive RFPS that Don't Scare Away Talent
December 9, 2021
"We took thousands of hours of curated content and built a chatbot around it so it’s not garbage in, garbage out."
Louis RosenfeldThe Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld
June 5, 2024
"Context is all those external circumstantial variables that help us make sense of reality."
Patrizia BertiniDesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact!
January 8, 2024
