As part of our research, we talked to Veterans at a local Boston ceremony honoring those who fought in the Vietnam War.
(This post is the second part of an ongoing series about a team of Harvard students’ efforts to help the VA build resources for the future. You can find the first post here.)
“You have to navigate through five or six different stages to get to where you need…[but] I like it. You can set your own appointments, refill prescriptions--all right here.” Steve, an 80-year-old Veteran, pointed to his iPhone.
Steve had ushered us into the hallway, away from the noise of the honorary Veteran’s event we were at, to make sure we caught every word of his feedback about the VA’s website. He spoke excitedly and at great length about how much he loved the site, which was a bit of a surprise: we’d heard from other Veterans about difficulties getting needed information, frustrations related to logging in over and over, and confusion around which benefits they were eligible for. But none of this mattered to Steve – he loved what the site offered.
Steve is one of the more than 40% of visitors to VA.gov who visit the site from a smartphone or tablet, and he didn’t seem to mind at all that the site isn’t optimized for use on mobile devices. But there are more than nine million Veterans receiving benefits from the VA – did other Veterans share his experiences? Should we streamline the several stages Steve had mentioned? Should the VA build a mobile app? We would need to talk to as many Veterans as we could to get to the bottom of this.
We found Steve, and the honorary brunch for African-American Veterans, through a Veteran Service Organization (one of many organizations in Boston and across the country that advocate for Veterans’ benefits and help them navigate what can be a complex system). We met several Veterans through our outreach to such organizations, including Carl, an older Veteran who expressed having a hard time finding what he needed on the website. “There was a lot of searching...you had to know where you were.”
Already two Veterans mentioned the many steps and searching involved in navigating the website. A mobile app-- a pared down version of the website-- could certainly ease navigation. But do Veterans have other needs? What other themes would emerge?
These are some of the public events we attended in our quest to learn from Veterans.
In our mission to speak to as many Veterans as possible, we set out to the VA hospital in hopes of catching a spare minute of Veterans’ time while they waited for appointments, tests, and shuttles. When we arrived at the Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center, beyond the bustling white coats and hospital staff, we saw a cozy enclave where some elderly Veterans lounged in armchairs...and most of them were on their smartphones.
Even though these folks had a surprisingly wide range of experiences and preferences, several topics continued to resurface throughout our conversations. We interviewed several Veterans like Andy who, while tech-savvy, said the “multiple logins [on the website] are confusing,” and all the protections can be a headache, explaining, “every time I log in there is some password reset I have to do.” Still others spoke about the need to look up appointment details while on the go, and their inability to access this information quickly from their phone.
We even heard from some Veterans like Nate, who doesn’t have a smartphone or computer and prefers to communicate with the VA over the phone or in-person. Yet, of the veterans we spoke with who did use the website (we did 35 interviews in all), it became clear that there was indeed room to improve online services to better meet Veterans’ individual needs, and that an app just might be the solution.
We were greeted with kind smiles and patience everywhere we went, like this ceremony honoring Vietnam War Veterans and their families in South Boston.
But most of our in-person interviews had netted older Veterans (who had fought in Vietnam or even World War II), and we wanted to balance their perspectives with the experiences of younger, more tech-literate Veterans (who might have fought in Desert Storm, Iraq, and/or Afghanistan). To reach these folks, we designed an online survey and shared it not only with our new community organization partners in Boston, but also with Veterans on Reddit, a very active online community.
Our survey post in the Veterans group on Reddit, an active online community.
The 29 survey responses we received rounded out our knowledge of Veterans’ experiences with the VA online, and revealed a lot of common pain points and desires. Even younger, more tech-savvy veterans had difficulty navigating the website and accessing services. And most expressed desire for an easy way to manage appointments, access documents on-the-go, and communicate with healthcare providers.
So, should the VA build a mobile app? We certainly think so.
A distilled version of the website with basic, user-friendly functions that is easily accessible on-the-go sounds like the perfect solution. But will Veterans think so?
Our next step is to build prototypes of what a VA mobile app could look like and put them in front of Veterans to see if our ideas are as helpful as we think they are. We’ll learn from Veterans’ reactions, go back to the drawing board, revise our prototype, get more feedback, and so on – iterating until we hammer out a solution that we think can best meet the needs of the most Veterans.
Stay tuned to see how our mobile app idea evolves as we get more feedback from Veterans!