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
Toby Haug
Discussion
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Shan Shen
Translating UX Terms into Business Contexts
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Bram Wessel
Enterprise Information Architecture
2020 • Enterprise Community
Jen Cardello
Learning Velocity—The Insights Speedometer
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Noel Lamb
Cultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
2022 • Advancing Research Community
David Conrad
The Feeling of Data
2023 • Enterprise Community
Isaac Heyveld
Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Ryan Matthew
Bridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Helen Armstrong
Augment the Human. Interrogate the System.
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Greg Baker
Exploring What Decades of Expertise Can Do Outside a Traditional Tech Role
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dr Chloe Sharp
Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Aras Bilgen
Who does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Ross Smith
Breaking Barriers with Empathy
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Cornelius Rachieru
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Darian Davis
Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold

More Videos

Mansi Gupta

"Local women researchers in crisis zones help ensure safety and allow authentic stories to emerge."

Mansi Gupta

Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices

September 15, 2022

Michelle Morrison

"As soon as we started working from home, I sent an urgent email to say we have to change our strategy and experiment with new things."

Michelle Morrison

Culture Design

May 21, 2020

Sam Ladner

"User interviews are an absolute mainstay of user research practices and likely will always be a core tool."

Sam Ladner Megan Blocker Tanvi Dhond Katie Hansen Ricardo Martins

Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

September 4, 2024

Michelle Bejian Lotia

"AI can help us cut through noise and speed up the so-what part of insights but can’t replace human knowledge of strategy and customers."

Michelle Bejian Lotia Anne-Marie Morell

Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization

March 28, 2023

Helen Armstrong

"Working with AI is a lot less like working with another human and more like working with some weird force of nature."

Helen Armstrong

Augment the Human. Interrogate the System.

June 7, 2023

Onur Kocan

"Political parties at the provincial level have their own mandates, which complicates unified service design."

Onur Kocan Ayhan Ensici

Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul

November 16, 2022

Josh Clark

"Adventure nav pattern gives users the agency to choose different paths in a feed, rather than consuming a single algorithmic stream."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)

February 12, 2025

Tricia Wang

"Representation is key to avoiding harm and misinterpretation, especially when working with Indigenous and marginalized communities."

Tricia Wang

The most popular design thinking strategy is BS

January 27, 2022

John Cutler

"It’s actually very hard to prioritize things that are apples versus oranges without framing them similarly first."

John Cutler Harry Max

Prioritization for designers and product managers (1st of 3 seminars)

June 13, 2024