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
Tanya Snook
Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding
2021 • Enterprise Community
Liza Pemstein
Scaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
John Calhoun
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community
Jemma Ahmed
Redefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Greg Nudelman
Designing Conversational Interfaces
2019 • Enterprise Community
Séamus Byrne
Aligning Teams with Choreography
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Vitorio Miliano
Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Sean Dolan
A Practical Look at Creating More Usable Enterprise Customer Journeys
2019 • Enterprise Community
Andreas Huebner
What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Erin May
Distributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Katie Hansen
Finding the unknown in the known: Harnessing meta-analysis and literature review
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Harry Max
Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Luz Bratcher
This Is a Talk for Tired People
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Ryan Matthew
Bridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Marjorie Stainback
Transforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold

More Videos

Amy Evans

"Change is messy and it can be uncomfortable, much like baking bread—it’s hard to imagine sticky dough turning into a perfect loaf."

Amy Evans

How to Create Change

September 25, 2024

Gina Mendolia

"Grandmas provide grounding, resilience, and long-term perspective often through rituals and storytelling."

Gina Mendolia

Therapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems

December 3, 2024

Sam Proulx

"Accessibility features like voice assistants and captions make the world better for everyone, not just people with disabilities."

Sam Proulx

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

September 8, 2022

Dane DeSutter

"Many games are fully playable by the blind, despite being highly visual, through clever auditory cues and remapped controls."

Dane DeSutter Natalie Gedeon Deborah Hendersen Cheryl Platz

Beyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries

May 17, 2024

David Cronin

"Prototyping and co-creation workshops have been a huge accelerant to the design process."

David Cronin

The GE Design System and Thoughts about Craft at Scale

May 13, 2015

Peter Van Dijck

"The more I work with evals, the more I think UX and product people need to be involved because of the need for diverse perspectives."

Peter Van Dijck

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

October 15, 2025

Maggie Dieringer

"Our design ops hiring focuses heavily on cultural fit and process thinking rather than portfolio skills."

Maggie Dieringer

Cutting through the Noise

September 24, 2020

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

Francesca Barrientos, PhD

"We had to push back on the idea that we could just use existing models without understanding our team’s needs."

Francesca Barrientos, PhD

You Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity

June 8, 2022