How a Veteran-centric approach can improve digital access to VA services and benefits
We first met sitting around a table on a frigid Friday morning at Harvard’s Innovation Lab. We knew the class that brought us together—Tech and Innovation in Government—wouldn’t be easy, but we had no idea what was in store for us. Over the next three months, our team of three Harvard students would conduct more than one hundred in-depth interviews with US Veterans as we built and rebuilt an app prototype for one of America’s biggest government agencies, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). By our last meeting, we would be scattered around the globe in a pandemic, sharing our work with senior VA decision makers.
The first day of DPI663—where our journey started
The VA is a massive bureaucracy that faces the understandable challenges that come with delivering a wide range of benefits and services to nine million Veterans. Even so, the VA has a rich history of innovation. They developed the nicotine patch and implantable cardiac pacemaker, and even pioneered electronic medical records. In 2018 the Department revamped its digital presence, moving to a more streamlined and user-centric website that has received significant praise. Still, our partners at the VA—Presidential Innovation Fellows C.C. Gong and Clarice Chan and Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington—asked our team to look for ways to further improve the online experience, noting that 40% of the new website’s traffic came from mobile devices.
Our first class left us wondering how we would ever contribute in a meaningful way. We weren’t veterans, we hadn’t received VA services, and we weren’t even aware of all of the benefits the VA offers. Furthermore, two of us had absolutely no digital experience, and we were partnering with a team at the VA whose members had previously worked at top tech companies like Facebook and Microsoft. But it turns out our professor, Nick Sinai, knew something we didn’t: our inexperience would be our biggest strength. It forced us to hit the pavement and hear from Veterans themselves.
We started by talking to every Veteran we could find. We connected with local Veterans organizations, worked our personal networks, canvassed at the local VA hospital, and even interviewed our Uber driver on our way to a Veterans brunch. We asked Veterans about their experience with the VA, what was working, and what changes they would like to see.
A Veteran Uber driver showing us his phone (phone screen is pixelated for privacy)
While there is no “typical” Veteran—more than 9 million Veterans receive services ranging from home loans to medical insurance to job training—we found that many share the same frustrations. Chief among these difficulties was a sense of disjointedness when working with the VA, trouble finding answers to their questions, and uncertainty around which benefits they are eligible to receive. Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our field research with Veterans.
Our research yielded three areas where Veterans are frustrated with their digital experience
Talking to Veterans also allowed us to identify areas where the VA could take action to improve the Veteran digital experience. Veterans young and old, tech-savvy and tech-challenged alike, asked for many of the same features. Leading these “potential gains” were 1) managing medical appointments, 2) communicating with doctors, 3) eligibility determinations, and 4) quick access to documents.
We suggested four ways to improve the Veteran digital experience
Our data strongly suggested that, although the VA has made significant improvements to the Veteran digital experience, developing a mobile solution could greatly enhance these existing efforts. Our team explored several options, and debated the trade-offs between continuing to improve the website for mobile browsers, building a “progressive web app,” and building a “native app.” (A native mobile app is made specifically for a smartphone or tablet—chances are that all, or almost all, of the apps on your phone are native apps.)
We concluded that the native app would be able to best deliver the most-requested functions to Veterans – things like push notifications, the ability to upload a test result or application through the camera, and all-around ease of use and streamlined user experience. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have personal experience navigating the VA—we let Veteran needs guide our thinking.
As soon as we decided to build a prototype app, we faced another seemingly insurmountable challenge. The COVID-19 virus was spreading worldwide, forcing part of our team, Jeremiah and Taylor, into their Boston apartments. Our other team member, Lien, headed back home to Vietnam, where she had to spend two weeks in a quarantine camp. Though our new time zones pushed our meetings to late nights and early mornings, we didn’t miss a beat and got right to work using Balsamiq to create “wireframes,” or simplified visual representations of the app’s layout, and “prototypes,” which simulate what can happen when people interact with the app.
One of our very first paper prototypes
As we started developing the app, we kept in mind what one Veteran had warned us early on in our interviews: “don’t make an app for its own sake. Make sure it’s reliable.” Unless we provided the right balance of form and function (making sure that Veterans could do what they needed to do without being bombarded by extra information or options), we would be in danger of making Veterans’ current frustrations worse, not better.
A snapshot at one of our multiple online collaboration boards
Striking this right balance would take multiple rounds of feedback and refinement—we knew we weren’t going to get it right the first time (and we didn’t). Below, you can see our first prototype, with the buttons we thought Veterans would want in the order we thought they’d want them. Our first round of “user testing”—letting Veterans use the app while we watched and asked questions over Zoom—quickly shattered our assumptions of what features Veterans wanted and in what order. In response we took the buttons off the homescreen entirely for our second prototype and instead asked Veterans what they wanted, and in what order. We let Veteran input guide our design so that our “finished product” (on the far right below) was a direct reflection of Veteran feedback. Because each Veteran had their own idea of what they wanted to do with the app and how they wanted to do it, the order that we had imposed on them in the first prototype eventually became a “Quick Actions” section where each Vet could put whichever buttons they wanted at their fingertips.
How our prototypes changed after several iterations
Our final prototype lets Veterans do a lot: they can make medical appointments, communicate with their medical team, determine their eligibility, manage and review their benefits, access and upload their paperwork, and set up notifications and reminders. Just as important as the actual features was the user experience, and we knew we’d struck the right balance when we heard Allen’s comment, below:
While the end of the semester is our team’s finish line, the VA’s work continues to meet Veterans where they are—which is, increasingly, on their smartphones. Our partners at the VA were kind enough to schedule a (remote) roadshow for us, during which we had the honor and privilege of presenting our findings to a wide set of stakeholders at the VA, including James Gfrerer (Chief Information Officer at VA), VA executives, and the team that’s now getting underway with the development of such an app.
None of this work would have been possible without the dedication of the VA team, which provided us with just the right amount of help at all the right times. Despite the guidance and support they provided, they were careful to leave us free to follow our own path, guided by the voices of the many Veterans we spoke with. We believe the project was better for it, and they have our sincere thanks.
In three months, our team endured a pandemic, worked through five different app prototypes, and got feedback from over a hundred different Veterans. Though we came in with little knowledge of the VA, our intense focus on understanding Veteran experiences allowed us to gain valuable insight into their needs and how the VA might best address them. We’re excited to pass our findings to the internal team that is ensuring the VA moves forward in their mission to provide America’s Veterans with the benefits and services they’ve earned.
-Jeremiah Hay, A. Taylor Thomas, Lien Tran