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
"Splitting people’s allocation across different teams created work-life balance issues requiring more oversight."
Alicia MootyDesign Staffing Models
September 30, 2021
"The more people know about HITS, the more they want to use it, though some teams have cultural resistance."
Matt DuignanHITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
July 16, 2019
"Giving ChatGPT custom instructions is like training your alien."
Soma Ghosh Savina Hawkins Dave Hoffer Rob Thomas Victor UdoewaWhat emerging methods are advancing UX research [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 28, 2023
"Most screen reader users prefer robotic voices so they can speed up the speech and read much faster than typical people."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
September 29, 2021
"You have to push against 200,000 years of evolution to encourage researchers to contribute to long-term repositories."
Ben Davies Matt Duignan Andrew Michael Dr. Emily DiLeoExpert Panel: The Principles of Research Repository Design
March 11, 2022
"Marketers don’t try very interesting things when their confidence in data is low, which can create a downward spiraling reinforcing loop."
Sarah FlamionComplex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
March 31, 2020
"It becomes the designer’s responsibility to figure out what aspects of the instructions to the LLM should be configurable and what should be fixed."
Trisha Causley[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features
June 5, 2024
"When participants interact with researchers of different backgrounds, it can deeply affect their responses and the authenticity of data."
Sharon Banh Dave Hora Marieke McCloskey Alicia ZhongReimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
October 16, 2024
"Design for emotion to create experiences that resonate beyond functionality."
Prayag Narula Hannah HudsonEmpowering Designers to do Good Research
March 11, 2022