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
"Sentient design is about proposing direction without imposing it—laying a road in front of the user, but letting them choose."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)
February 12, 2025
"Depersonalizing the situation is a huge winner in nearly any hard conversation."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Navigating Conversations with Your Boss (Part 1 of 3)
April 14, 2025
"AI is table stakes now. It's on every roadmap and not going anywhere."
Joe Meersman Pooria SohiUse AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint
September 25, 2024
"If we improve areas of friction on behalf of the design department, people’s ability to achieve goals will increase."
Jacqui FreyFlow and Superfluidity for Design Orgs
November 7, 2018
"The farther away you are from the CEO or GM, the less happy and healthy your organization tends to be."
Peter MerholzThe 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health
November 12, 2025
"We want to deepen equity and care in how we work, who we do it with, and the output and impact it generates."
Ariel KennanTheme Two Intro
November 17, 2022
"The presence of conflict is often an indication that something new is trying to emerge."
Laura WeissTurn Down the Heat: 3 Ways to Handle Conflict in the Moment
November 20, 2024
"The table needs to be larger, longer, or maybe a circle of people without a table to include more voices."
Robert Fabricant Sahibzada Mayed Nidhi Singh RathoreIndustry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
October 2, 2024
"Every output should have at least three source links, almost like citations in a research paper."
Savannah CarlinDon't botch the bot: Designing interactions for AI
June 4, 2024
