Modernizing government systems
I joined the movement to leverage research, design, and technology to improve government services with the Ad Hoc team in 2021. I worked on several projects at Veterans Affairs that included Veteran facing services, enterprise systems for VA staff, and improving tele-urgent care systems for VA hospital staff.
Ad Hoc, born out of the rescue of HealthCare.gov, is a digital services company that helps the federal government better serve people.
Case study: Modernizing a benefit application
The Challenge:
The VA wanted to improve the Veteran experience by offering a highly accessible way to access their benefits and modernize a paper form required to be compensated for disabilities they incurred in service. The paper process was slow and arduous for both Veterans and the case workers processing the applications. The project was urgent as The PACT act expanded benefits and VA was concerned about their systems handling the expected increase.
The paper form presented challenges to both Veterans and VA staff which slowed delivery of critical benefits.
My role
I led research and design on a cross-functional team and coordinated efforts across product, research and design, working with VA product owners and stakeholders, front-end and back-end developers, API developers, adjudication experts, PACT act specialists, and VA.gov product teams.
The process
Research
We began by leveraging what we already knew through previous research to quickly understand Veteran and case worker pain points then conducted highly specific Veteran and staff interviews and gathered insights from call center issues.
Orchestrate cross-functional team collaboration
I facilitated collaborative workshops to audit the form and map each field to impact and identify opportunities to reduce administrative burden and simplify. We worked closely with engineering to understand the constraints in the process so we could deliver within the urgent timeline.
Scope for fast delivery
We identified and focused the team on the critical path to guide Veterans to successful outcomes, aligned on key features, and created and agile roadmap for now, next, later delivery.
Reduce burden
We focused on areas where we could reduce burden on Veterans by predicting their needs, pre-filling their information, and reducing friction using skip logic to fast track them past questions that didn’t fit their circumstances.
Design the Conversation
I first designed the experience as a conversation between the VA and the Veteran. This approach allowed us to center accessibility by focusing on the screen reader experience, ensure we used plain language asking one question per page that guided Veterans through the decision they needed to make optimized for a mobile device.
We rigorously tested our hypotheses with Veterans, Subject-Matter Experts, and Stakeholders
Test and Learn
In close collaboration with my engineering and accessibility leads, I prototyped and tested our hypotheses with Veterans, our stakeholders, and subject-matter experts and iterated where they struggled. We found ways to improve certain parts of the flow and got to a high confidence rating. Asking Veterans to recall traumatic events risks re-traumatizing them. It was important to conduct evaluative research in a trauma-informed way, so we were highly intentional in our research planning, prototype scenarios, and recruitment.
Measure and iterate
We identified key metrics to ensure we were improving the rate of successful completion of the form, the time to case resolution, approval rate, and a reduction in call center issues. At launch all of the metrics had significantly improved and the team continued to iterate to enhance the experience over time.
Additional reading: Read more about how this project helped me use conversation design as a tool for inclusivity.
Please inquire to see more of my work with Veterans Affairs.
