Veterans Affairs
Non-Disability Benefits Programs
Client:
Department of Veteran Affairs (VA)
Non-disability Benefits programs
Role(s):
Senior Product Designer
Program Overview
To help Veterans Affairs (VA) provide the Veteran community with access to benefits in minutes—not months—in a modern ecosystem, my team created and improved tools on VA.gov., enabling Veterans to submit to new benefits, track current and past benefits claims, appeals, and decision reviews. Veterans can now download disability claim decision letters and appeal decisions immediately via the Claim Status Tool (CST).
Project Background
The Challenge: Create a comprehensive experience that allows Veterans to apply for benefits they qualify for and better understand the decisions and reasonings for how their applications are reviewed in real time.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO)-Digital Experience (DE) needed help with the management, improvement, and maintenance of the Benefits Tools Crew portion of the VA.gov product team’s suite of services. Over the two-year contract period, my team provided human-centered research, design, engineering, and product management support to meet these goals. I reviewed the form flows and user journeys to reduce cognitive and time burdens while improving digital experiences for Veterans, caregivers, and their families, as well as VA service providers.
During initial discovery I interviewed stakeholders about the Pension program and found that there were critical questions missing from the digital experience that were only being asked on the paper forms. At that moment we realized the digital experience had a 100% failure rate and the form needed to be temporarily disabled. I then mapped every paper form to the digital experience to find where the discrepancies were so that we could quickly correct and reactivate the form allowing for Veterans to successfully apply for Pension benefits online again.
Discovery
Not only did I map all questions from the paper form to the digital experience I also mapped the full user journey noting and indicating all major and minor decision points as well as a SWOT analysis of the forms questions using google analytics to better understand failure rates and areas where the Veteran’s applying often had errors.
Exploration
Once the full user journey was mapped through every discoverable decision point, I then reviewed the journey to see if there were ways to optimize each step and all the questions within the step. This exploration was crucial to understanding which steps the Veterans needed information they may not readily know so that we could create informative prompts and inform the Veterans ahead of time to gather necessary resources which lead to higher form completion rates as well as reviewing opportunities to change open fields to multiple selection prompts to reduce cognitive load.
Leveraging the VA Design System
After a robust review of the current state and identifying our key opportunities I closely reviewed each individual interaction to review how best to convey the information so that we could reduce cognitive burden on the Veteran, improve completion times and simplify the over all form process.
Identifying OKRs to improve overall experience
While reviewing each page not only to understand the overall user flow it was important to review each interaction. During this phase we identified bugs or interactions we expected to happen differently, opportunities to give our Veterans a better experience and discussion points to decide if we needed to make a change or needed more research to inform what our approach should be.
Refinement
Once bugs, opportunities and the overall flow of each step of the form were reviewed and analyzed low fidelity mapping of the form began to note were changes and improvements could be made to optimize the overall experience. The goal here was to better group required questions as well as streamline the form to improve completion times.
Impact
Since its launch in January 2023, Veterans have downloaded 7.7 million decision letters. Users have reported their experience with the tool has improved their trust in VA by 4.7%, which has been linked to the ability to download decision letter PDF from VA.gov in real time.
