Page 68 - FCW, November, December 2018
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 appointments and more on a single screen.
In the future, Jacobs would like to use VA data to create a recommen- dation engine that suggests possible areas of interest to users based on their age, location, military service and more.
“It’s the Amazon model of benefits,” she said.
Chris Johnston, a U.S. Digital Ser- vice team member detailed to VA, said research has shown that veterans “are super-frustrated to have to tell us the same thing over and over again.” The goal of the new site is to collect data once rather than have to ask for per- sonal data for every transaction.
Work on the VA.gov redesign kicked off in February and proceeded quickly because of a “willingness of our organi- zations to say, ‘We’re not serving peo- ple. Let’s create one front door where 80 percent of things are quickly acces- sible,’” Johnston said.
After the Veterans Day launch, next steps for the revised VA.gov include building a common content manage- ment system and using best practices to impose cross-agency governance on VA content to avoid duplication, conflict and inconsistency.
“Right now, we have 2,000 people who write content for the site, and trying to get everyone to write in the same voice, in plain language, is not trivial,” Jacobs said.
Ad Hoc is the prime contractor for the Vets.gov site, and Jacobs said new contracts will be announced soon to “support the longer tail” of VA’s con- tent effort. n
After building a customer-centric Vets.gov, the Department of Veterans Affairs is now folding those resources into a redesigned VA.gov. The new site’s features and navigation were tested with more than 1,800 veterans and provide easy access to nine key benefit hubs.
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