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
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Centralized user research with a shared participant database enables rapid, ethical, and inclusive veteran research across multiple teams.
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Cross-contract collaboration is fostered via Slack channels, weekly meetings, and informal feedback sessions to break down contractor competition.
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Standardizing design tools and governance prevents duplication and ensures accessibility and quality across dozens of contractors.
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A mandatory collaboration cycle tied to design mock-ups enforces quality and consistency before app deployment.
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Making design work visible early through an experimental design system process prevents duplicated efforts and unclear scope.
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Specialized centralized support teams (content, accessibility, IA, QA) let designers focus while ensuring expertise is applied.
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Contracting structures often hinder cohesion, necessitating continuous method adjustments and relationship building.
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Balancing agile development with federal budget and legal constraints remains a key challenge.
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Providing reliable veteran access and diverse participant pools requires ongoing partnerships, including outreach to specialized veteran groups.
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The VA’s cohesive design efforts have increased the use of veteran self-service tools from hundreds to millions of daily users.
Notable Quotes
"Unless you have a group of friends who magically can read each other's minds, potlucks often end up with random snack foods picked up on the way to your house."
"We have designers working as strategists and tacticians, managers of quality, and builders, spanning government employees and contractors."
"Government designers seek to reduce variation and standardize UX patterns while contractors may optimize for their single product without awareness of others."
"To build successful government services, folks who have capacity must deliberately foster cross-company collaboration and psychological safety."
"Every team building on the platform is required to follow the collaboration cycle. If you don't follow it, you don't deploy your application and launch. It's that simple."
"Designers aren’t expected to be experts in every product-related skill; centralized teams provide accessibility, content, IA, and QA expertise."
"We created a process that allows designers to contribute ideas back to our design system even if they haven't been fully validated yet."
"Budgeting mechanisms are mostly built around buying software once rather than supporting continuous agile improvements."
"Contracts should be written to take whole experiences into account instead of isolated parts of products."
"Since the launch of va.gov, we've seen self-service tool usage grow from hundreds to millions of veterans each month."
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