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
"Business people thrive in certainty; designers habitually thrive in ambiguity."
Nathan ShedroffRedefining Value: Bridging the Innovation Culture Divide
May 14, 2015
"There is no formula for good critiques, but mindset is behavior over time: humility, active listening, gratitude, owning blind spots, and acknowledgment."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"Start with the problem, not the solution when partnering with engineers."
Dawn ResselFull-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
June 9, 2016
"Collaboration with participants via video is possible even in constricted remote or hybrid work environments with the right methods."
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA) Charley Scull Prabhas PokharelWhat Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
March 11, 2022
"We want radical transparency while adopting radically opaque technology."
Uday Gajendar Robin BeersMaking the Invisible Visible: The most critical deliverable isn't always the design
July 22, 2026
"I’m excited about scaling our research work with better ops support and building tools to share knowledge more efficiently."
Kayla Farrell Chelsey Glasson Sean Fitzell Jared LeClercWhat It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
March 12, 2021
"Please read our site’s code of conduct — it ensures we all treat each other with kindness and respect."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
June 11, 2021
"Ruthless prioritization is really the outcome of conversations that helped me focus on where I can make the most impact."
Julie Gitlin Esther RaiceDesign as an Agent of Digital Transformation at JPMC
June 9, 2021
"You can’t lead without being a lifelong learner because when your company stops learning, it dies."
Louis RosenfeldDiscussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
November 6, 2017