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
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 1: Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Brianna Sylver
Lead With Purpose
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Samuel Proulx
Designing beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
The power to heal and harm
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Mansi Gupta
Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jamika Burge
Embracing change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 3: Understand AI architectures: RAG, Agents, Oh My!
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Inclusive Design is DesignOps
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Erika Flowers
The Handoff is Dead: Design-Led Engineering with AI Agents
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sam Proulx
Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jessamyn Edwards
Surviving Your UX Career in Enterprise Design
2021 • Enterprise Community
Erika Flowers
Introduction to MURAL for UX
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 1: The new product journey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Renee Reid
Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Llewyn Paine
Day 1 Using AI in UX with Impact
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Saskia Liebenberg
Start Small for Big Impact
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Sarah Brooks

"I am in the land of the traditional territory of many diverse indigenous nations."

Sarah Brooks

Theme 3 Intro

December 10, 2021

Prayag Narula

"Founders are hard to recruit for research, so showing genuine interest by solving their problems helps turn them into advocates."

Prayag Narula Abhinav Krishna

Dialing for Research: How to Reach the Unreachable

March 10, 2022

Tom Armitage

"There’s a reason we’re always taught to write notes or when we revise, we write notes out by hand, the hand remembers."

Tom Armitage Carla Diana Kanene Ayo Holder

Day 2 Panel: Looking ahead: Designing with AI in 2026

June 11, 2025

Erin Weigel

"There was no meaningful difference between AI follow-up questions and static researcher questions in uncovering usability issues."

Erin Weigel Petra Rajkov

Testing and Experimentation Tools

March 12, 2026

Christian Crumlish

"I feel a lot of pain and anxiety in the community people wondering, you know is our seat at the table slipping away."

Christian Crumlish

Introduction by our Conference Chair

December 6, 2022

Janaki Kumar

"Larry Fink said that to prosper over time, companies must deliver financial performance and show positive contribution to society."

Janaki Kumar

Innovate with Purpose

June 14, 2018

Craig Villamor

"Designing for the real world means dealing with practical constraints and making refinements in the face of compromise."

Craig Villamor

Resilient Enterprise Design

June 8, 2017

Jenny Price

"Transformation isn't just about ideas, it's about infrastructure."

Jenny Price

From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise

September 10, 2025

Christian Rohrer

"In business-to-business contexts, finding a champion within your sales or account management teams can open access to users for research."

Christian Rohrer

Research Operations at Scale

November 7, 2017