Veterans Affairs – Disability Claim Submission Experience

My role

Human-centered design lead, working within a cross-functional product team.

Activities

Service design
Interaction design
Technical discovery
Research strategy
Workshop facilitation
Cross-team alignment
Epic planning

Millions of Veterans apply for VA disability benefits online

Disability compensation is one of the most commonly-used benefits offered by The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). VA provides monetary compensation to Veterans with disabilities that stem from their military service. In 2023, VA processed over 2.2 million claims for disability compensation. VA offers Veterans several ways to apply for disability compensation. Applying online is one convenient method.

Veterans lacked clarity when applying for disability compensation claims online

We learned from discovery research that many Veterans had a poor experience when applying online. Even when claim submission went smoothly, Veterans lacked clarity and had incomplete information about the status of their claim. Their next step was often to call the contact center for basic status information. Questions about claim status were the most common reason for contacting support, which drained support capacity and increased wait times for others.

When claim submission didn’t go smoothly, like when there were backend system issues processing a claim, Veterans experienced confusion, burden, and additional cognitive load during a time when they were asked to recall traumatic events that led to their disabilities. Often the step to resolution was not clear, and many Veterans either gave up or took longer to successfully get their claims through submission. This added delays before Veterans ultimately got the benefits they had earned.

Gathering info on the current state

We investigated and documented the existing flow of a claim through various backend systems under all possible scenarios. This helped us understand what information we had access to, timing required to get certain pieces of information, and what potential changes would be feasible in the short term.

Diagram showing the flow of a claim through various backend systems — We used stars on the diagram to identify points at which to communicate key pieces of information.

We then mapped the steps onto service blueprints (one per scenario) to align the backend processes with key steps in the Veteran experience. We mapped out elapsed time since submission in one row. We also used rows to split out parts of the front stage and back stage that we treated as separate products.

Part of the service blueprint for the happy path scenario.

The service blueprints highlighted that Veterans expected a confirmation email immediately after they clicked “submit”, but the first confirmation email they got took 6-24 hours after submission to arrive, and it depended on a string of synchronous and asynchronous processes to complete before it sent. Also, in some cases, the confirmation was sent inappropriately since there was one asynchronous process that the system didn’t check for success before sending the confirmation.

First confirmation email that Veterans received.

Planning how to approach the problem

Since the product ecosystem was complicated and realizing much of the work depended on coordinating with other teams, it was crucial to plan this work thoughtfully so that we could deliver value to Veterans quickly and learn from early releases before sinking too much time into approaches that don’t work well.

We created a user story map with our product manager to organize epics. Each epic included a set of desired outcomes that covered multiple steps in the user journey.

The user story map sliced epics vertically across the user journey.

We also met with other teams to learn from them and coordinate our solutions. These teams included the contact center and two teams who worked on parts of the product that Veterans used to check their submission status.

Next, we focused on designing a solution for the first epic, to provide Veterans timely and truthful information about their claim after submission.

How and when do we communicate submission status to Veterans?

I mocked up a few approaches to how the design could provide timely and truthful information about claim submission, using different design system components and integrating with other existing parts of the product.

One approach centered on using a process list. With this approach, we anticipated confusion between the process list shown here on the confirmation screen and another process list on an informational screen describing the process after filing a claim.

Another approach involved incorporating the confirmation step into another part of the product which Veterans later use to check the status of their claim. This would have caused some delays in releasing the first epic but could still be worth exploring in later releases.

After assessing these options with stakeholders, we settled on this approach which consolidated secondary information into accordions and updated language and hierarchy on the confirmation screen.

We explored a few conceptual models of how we describe what is happening and what the current state of a claim submission is at various points. This language was key to being truthful about when a submission has ultimately succeeded.

We went through several unsuccessful ideas for the conceptual model and settled on hiding the internal complexity of the claim submission going from one internal system to another. We also used language of “submission in progress” immediately after submission to be truthful that we weren’t yet confident that the submission succeeded.

I mocked up and prototyped our internally-refined design at this point.

UI screens and emails for the happy path scenario, along with elapsed time and steps in the user flow. We added a new confirmation email sent immediately after the Veteran clicked “submit”.

The confirmation screen used updated language of “your submission is in progress”.

The newly added immediate confirmation email conveyed that the submission was in progress. It also reinforced expectations for timing of next steps. It highlighted that “it typically takes 3 days for us to receive your claim” and that “it may take 7-10 days for [the] claim to appear online.” Another team was working to eliminate the 7-10 day gap before the claim appears online, but this delay would still be in place with our first planned release.

Testing and refining our ideas

I worked with our researcher to plan evaluative research. Our research goals were to:

Evaluate how effectively the conceptual model set clear expectations for claim submission timeline.
Evaluate if submission touchpoints were timely and useful for Veterans.
Generate ideas for the next epic to improve the claim record.

Our researcher led remote usability testing of prototypes for three scenarios and synthesized the findings. Among other details, we learned that:

Veterans’ existing mental models for submission didn’t match the actual timeline and process that was in place. Participants expected electronic submission to happen instantaneously, not over 3 days. Also, many participants thought that the submission journey in these 3 days was a human-driven process rather than the actual string of asynchronous technical processes.
The happy and backup path scenarios were easy to understand overall and left participants feeling confident that their submission was complete.
Participants were confused about the timelines of “3 days for us to receive [their] claim” and “7-10 days for [their] claim to appear online”. Some added these two durations together and thought that they would have a decision on their claim in 13 days. Others thought the two durations were describing the same step and the fact that there were different durations listed was a typo.
Most participants didn’t feel a need to check the status of their submission online once it was received.

We revised the design based on these findings. Below is a video walkthrough of the happy path scenario.

Updated initial confirmation email. Given the research findings that Veterans were confused about the two timelines originally included and that most participants didn’t feel a need to check the status of their submission online once it was received, we eliminated the mention of the “7 – 10 days for your claim to appear online.”

The balance of how much backstage information to surface

Much of this process (and much of the journey others before my team have traveled) involved balancing how much backstage information to surface about backstage processes. We began with an idea to show more, and our research guided us to show less. We also learned that when we are obscuring backstage processes for the sake of simplicity, we must ensure that all scenarios that could arise are considered and work together seamlessly with what we communicate to Veterans.