Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
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 insider-outsider thing is kind of an artificial separation because many of us go back and forth between those roles."
Dan WillisTheme 3: Intro
January 8, 2024
"Understanding the lifecycle of AI code is essential because AI is essentially code running in constant evolution."
Aras BilgenWho does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
June 10, 2025
"Feelings are emergence; you need to measure emotion at scale, not just one-on-one usability."
Dane DeSutter Natalie Gedeon Deborah Hendersen Cheryl PlatzBeyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries
May 17, 2024
"If you’re the first researcher, you will often encounter organizational inertia, and the key is to find a partner team and succeed there first."
Dave HoraAdvice for Establishing Research
December 8, 2022
"Designers felt like hamsters in a hamster wheel, always reacting, never exploring."
Maria SkaadenContinuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
November 8, 2018
"You don’t have to overhaul your process to be inclusive; small changes embedded across stages make a huge difference."
Gabriela BarnevaOperationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops
September 11, 2025
"People are starting to catch on with the fact that design matters and that it’s maturely important to solving the problems we face."
Greg PetroffSoftware as Material—A Redux
June 6, 2023
"My team felt lonely—like lone wolves being the only one of their kind on their teams."
Courtney KaplanTaking it to the next level: Career paths in DesignOps
November 8, 2018
"I would prefer not to reduce human understanding to shallow sound bites."
Jemma AhmedTheme 1 Intro
March 10, 2026
