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
"Designers deserve support and infrastructure so they can really excel in their work."
Rachel Posman John Calhoun"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
September 25, 2024
"Having empathy hours where different people across the org listen to user insights helps build better understanding and skills."
Lija HoganDoing more with more: Lessons from the Front Lines of Democratization
March 9, 2022
"Unpaid design exercises are unfair because they don’t take into account people's real-life constraints."
Russ UngerOnboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
November 7, 2017
"Our CMO was developing a brand strategy at the same time and organically integrated our experience principles into it, which was huge for us."
Sarah WilliamsVerizon_A Framework for CX Transformation
January 8, 2024
"We’re going to explore trauma responsive design, radical participatory design, and ethical technologies."
Sarah BrooksTheme 3 Intro
December 10, 2021
"This community doesn’t want to hide its secrets because we’re all too new to want to do that."
Peter MerholzThe Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
August 25, 2022
"Building a network early can create amazing opportunities further along the career path."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
"Humans are still better at many activities and those strengths should be prioritized."
Carol SmithOperationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
June 7, 2023
"Non-researchers running their own research can produce mediocre results if they lack operational support and guidance."
Ned Dwyer Emily Stewart James WallisThe Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
September 24, 2024
