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
"The hard part was actually just getting my house to talk to itself."
Tristin OldaniLearning the Part I Used to Hand Off: How Building the Systems Made Me a Better Designer
August 20, 2026
"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
"Slow down to speed up means focusing on long-term shared goals rather than immediate conflicts."
Tutti TaygerlyVideconference: How to Work with Difficult People with Tutti Taygerly
June 25, 2020
"We cannot remove barriers we aren’t aware of."
Samuel ProulxDesigning beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
December 4, 2024
"Gunshots were a routine sound growing up. We became numb to it."
Kyria Stephens Marlon KernerPower to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
November 17, 2022
"Most introverts are really good about cultivating personal relationships and listening."
Dorelle RabinowitzThe Magic Word is Trust
June 15, 2018
"Uber bus drivers in Cairo end up working longer than their scheduled shift because they still receive requests 20 to 30 minutes before their shift ends."
Etienne FangPower of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
December 16, 2019
"Facilitating a shared understanding among everyone on product takes a lot of time."
Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen LiuShort Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"We're shopping for data across the organization to create virtual personas that guide our innovation."
Joe Meersman Pooria SohiUse AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint
September 25, 2024
