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
"Design is a service profession, a humble profession, less significant than the lives of the people we serve."
Richard BuchananCreativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise
June 15, 2018
"We had precise metrics built on false assumptions, so we had to shift to more contextualized signals."
Patrick Boehler Madison KarasThe service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design
November 19, 2025
"Design is deeply entrenched in emotional intelligence; it’s about understanding the question beneath the question."
Steve ChaparroBringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space
August 13, 2020
"Not everyone can become a great UX researcher, but a great UX researcher can come from anywhere."
Mackenzie GuinonM.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder
March 9, 2022
"You can’t just break apart these components and type; instead, you change their properties to adjust labels, colors, or icons."
Jack BeharHow to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
December 6, 2022
"Users are smart, innovative, and a lot of the innovation actually comes from users rather than big companies."
Prayag Narula Rida QadriHCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
March 28, 2023
"If you want to scale, incorporate global UX research from day one and test your assumptions broadly."
Nancy DouyonWe'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
June 15, 2018
"Augmenting our sensors through AI becomes possible with increasingly egocentric perspectives on the user’s context."
Lukas Moro“Feels Like Paper!”: Interfacing AI through Paper
June 11, 2025
"Design ops served as the backbone to operationalizing the organization, enabling scale, repeatability, and stakeholder confidence."
Jenny PriceFrom Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
September 10, 2025
