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
Meghan Bausone
Systems Thinking and Design Innovation: Working with Leverage Points in Rural Maternal Health Systems
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 2: Evals are your moat
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sarah Rink
Remote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Carol Massa
Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
JP Allen
Navigating the UX Tool Landscape
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Jennifer Fraser
What would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Theresa Marwah
How Atlassian is Operationalizing Respect in Research
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Ash Brown
Silver Linings: What DesignOps Learned in the Shift to WFH
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Alex Hurworth
Designing a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Marc Rettig
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Leah Buley
Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Llewyn Paine
Day 1 Using AI in UX with Impact
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
The Future of Design Operations: Transforming Our Craft
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Nathan Reiff
Research, from Unimaginable to Presently Possible: A Future-Casting Sticky-Note Sprint
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Amy Brana Stuart
Rest in Peace Fly-in-fly-out Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold

More Videos

Alfred Kahn

"If product and engineering see you as problem solvers who make their lives easier, they’ll make you central to their work."

Alfred Kahn

A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner

November 29, 2023

Louis Rosenfeld

"The state of the UX profession just totally sucks, doesn't it?"

Louis Rosenfeld

Coffee with Lou

January 11, 2024

Prabhas Pokharel

"We try to bring some order to chaos after every research session."

Prabhas Pokharel Mayo Nissen

Order and Chaos: New Ways of Collaborating on Synthesis and Storytelling

March 10, 2022

Natalie Dunbar

"Content strategy should be at the kickoff to determine the needed level of involvement early."

Natalie Dunbar

DesignOps and Content Strategy: Envisioning the Future Together

October 1, 2021

Dave Malouf

"DesignOps needs to work more horizontally to bridge silos between product, marketing, engineering, and research."

Dave Malouf Patrizia Bertini Jon Fukuda

The Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 2)

April 28, 2022

Erin Weigel

"Picking the wrong size image can impact customer experience as much as what you see on screen."

Erin Weigel

UX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests

July 10, 2024

Fisayo Osilaja

"Timely engagement helps stakeholders make faster, more informed decisions leading to better business outcomes."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Theresa Slate

"We asked people to judge others’ feedback with an anti-bias lens instead of focusing on their own biases."

Theresa Slate Erin Robertson

Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do

October 4, 2023

Prayag Narula

"Most users don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Prayag Narula Hannah Hudson

Empowering Designers to do Good Research

March 11, 2022