Page 17 - CARAHSOFT, May/June 2020

VA.gov is now focused on the 20 things that represent over 80% of what veterans are coming to a VA website to do.
Digital Experience
of cases, if you use a self-service tool, the VA can get you an answer faster. The third goal was to consistently deliver a satisfying experience.
We thought about the experience our customers have when they interact with non-government websites. Companies present themselves in a way that’s very customer focused with a clear way to log in and see a personalized view
of the things you can get from that business. They also have action-oriented content that quickly takes you through
a flow or connects you with the thing you’re looking for. And there’s a single corporate brand.
The new VA.gov homepage was
the result of six months of iterating
on designs, starting with low-fidelity wireframes that we would test in in- person usability sessions in regional offices and medical centers. From there, we worked it up into a slightly higher fidelity — still not full graphics but just trying to get the information architecture down and testing the designs to see how quickly people could complete a task and find information that we know a lot of veterans are looking for.
Iterative design and
measurable results
We had the benefit of a platform called Vets.gov that had been working to improve the customer experience for a few years before we did the redesign of VA.gov.
Vets.gov began with a mandate to make it easy to access the services and benefits that the VA provides, but it started off pretty small. It just provided content about how to get disability and education benefits, rewritten in a way that was easier to understand.
It was not a full solution, but that didn’t stop us from launching the site and then iterating it over time, adding new content and seeing how well it was working. The usage of the site grew, and Vets.gov got
a redesign that was a little more action- oriented by 2018. The platform provided a lot of lessons that we could bring forward to the new VA.gov, which launched in November 2018.
VA.gov is now focused on the 20 things that represent over 80% of what veterans are coming to a VA website to do. They’re very action oriented, with lots of verbs: check your status, apply for health care.
Also, VA.gov used to have descriptions about how to do something, but the actual interaction took you to a different portal. Today, if you click on one of these links, it takes you right to the place where you can do what you need to do, all on the same platform.
Across a number of our business lines, we’ve seen significant increases in usage. Disability compensation benefits submitted online are up over 20%. Profile updates
— updating an email or mailing address — were hard to access before. They’re up over 400% since we relaunched VA.gov. And
there are ripple effects. A claim submitted online is faster for the VA to work because we don’t have to deal with the paper. A mailing address updated easily means we don’t send a postcard to the wrong address and have it sent back or lost.
And, importantly, we saw a 9% increase in our overall customer satisfaction scores. This is across every VA website even though not every website was touched by this redesign. Among the areas that were touched by the redesign, we saw a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores.
Making changes less risky
In government IT, we often make it hard
to do something that should be simple. A person needs something and there’s a piece of software that could deliver it, but we
put all this stuff between them. We found success in cutting through that by using DevOps tactics.
It requires a tight integration with the business team, software developers and designers. Finding a team — and then giving them a clear mandate and letting them do what they do best — was probably the single biggest reason this project succeeded.
All these tactics are just trying to make changes easier, less risky and less costly. If every change is small, it’s not that risky.
Also, it’s easy to undo. What’s risky is packaging up a bunch of changes into a big quarterly deployment that you do over a weekend and hope it all works.
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