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 has a beautiful advantage in understanding the story needed to be market relevant and connect with audiences."
Kevin BethuneGatekeepers and Servant Leadership
January 30, 2020
"In Procore, design moved from tasting the cake to baking the cake by being involved early in strategy and planning."
Alfred KahnA Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner
November 29, 2023
"Early on, getting stakeholders to attend syncs felt like pulling teeth, but later it became their favorite meeting."
Elena Naids Liza McRuerThe Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space
October 2, 2023
"Text-based campaigns have been very successful for reaching senior citizens."
Amanda Kaleta-Kott Lea Martin, PhDThe Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults
March 11, 2022
"There’s no point in sitting in your office because there’s no new information available there. Everything is probably pre-filtered."
Fredrik MathesonFirst-time users, longtime strategies: Why Parkinson’s Law is making you less effective at work – and how to design a fix.
June 8, 2016
"Voice control on mobile was developed primarily to support people with disabilities."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
September 8, 2022
"Nobody actually cares that we’re better researchers. The question should be, what makes us different? What makes us distinctive?"
Peter LevinSolve a Problem Here, Transform a Strategy There: Research as an Occasion for Expanding Organizational Possibility
March 25, 2024
"Companies had to relearn their customers during COVID because behavior had fundamentally changed."
Janelle EstesUX Research Trends
January 28, 2021
"The design of our systems should make room for messy, complicated human realities, not just positive illusions."
Deanna ZandtThe Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
July 21, 2022
