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
"When you tap into the expertise that people with disabilities have developed over lifetimes, you will find problems to solve and solutions to use."
Samuel ProulxDesigning for Disability, Innovating for Everyone
March 11, 2025
"When you embed accessibility early in a platform rebuild, it alleviates a lot of chasing things down later on."
Laura SchaeferDesignOps: A Conduit for Inclusion
September 9, 2022
"Experimentation and agile approaches are key—try something, see how it works, then try something else if it doesn’t move the bar."
Susan WeinschenkEvaluating the Maturity of UX in Your Organization
January 15, 2020
"The researchers' role includes coaching, mentoring, and leading research efforts, not just doing research ops."
Smitha Papolu Nova Wehman-Brown Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterTheme 3 Discussion
June 4, 2019
"Enterprise UX is about fixing broken systems that have a momentum of their own; it’s about improving, not quick solutions."
Uday Gajendar Lada Gorlenko Dave Malouf Louis Rosenfeld Dan Willis10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
June 18, 2025
"User comes before experience, experience before design, design before technology."
Satyam KantamneniDo You Have an Experience Vision?
March 23, 2023
"Women are 70% more likely to walk or use public transit, combining trips that are much harder with snow than driving a car."
Kaitlin TaskerFast and Fearless Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
"Telling your story with visuals and resident quotes builds empathy and helps government stakeholders feel connected to the work."
Stephanie WadeBuilding and Sustaining Design in Government
December 8, 2021
"Majority of users relied heavily on Google to find government services rather than navigating the site itself."
Irina Tikhonova Kari DietrichSmall Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement
December 9, 2021
