Sitewide UX Sync (2024)

[jilladams]

NEW: Expanding Facilities UX sync to incorporate Public Websites as Sitewide UX Sync

Jump link to latest agenda

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/17669#issuecomment-2181118389

Meeting Purpose and Structure

This is a weekly meeting where we focus on the following actions:

• Presenting Sitewide UX work for feedback / signoff
• Roadmapping Sitewide UX work for prioritized initiatives
• Refining cards for upcoming UX work

Meeting logistics

• Thursdays at 3:05 - 4:00 pm ET
• Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83523330154?pwd=6MBNJhHaoBibK2P7aDstaievaK4l2s.1
• Scheduled via Sitewide Team Google calendar
• The second Thursday of every month, @davidconlon, @mmiddaugh, and @aklausmeier have a conflict for the second half hour of the meeting so we need to be sure to prioritize those agendas accordingly

Agenda

• The agenda is updated on a weekly basis by @davidmpickett
• Draft agenda will be sent out ~24 hours in advance via Slack
• If you have an item you would like to add, you can always add a comment to the ticket async
• Agenda items should have clear action-oriented language. Why are we looking at this item? What is the desired feedback or next step?
• Agenda items should ordered from highest priority to lowest priority
• Agenda items should have a rough time box

Attendees

• Core attendees
  • Sitewide UX team members (@davidmpickett, @thejordanwood, @laflannery)
  • Facilities PM / PO (TBD, @mmiddaugh)
  • Public Websites PM / PO (@FranECross, @davidconlon )
  • Sitewide UX Lead (@aklausmeier)
  • Sitewide Delivery Manager (@jilladams )
• All other attendees are optional and may choose to join or skip based on agenda
  • Sitewide Devs ( @omahane, @eselkin, @maxx1128, @randimays, @chriskim2311 , @dsasser )

[jilladams]

Q from Amanda here: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/16586#issuecomment-2024134170

@jilladams @davidmpickett Does this thought process also include scrapping Public Websites UX refinement and rolling into the Sitewide UX sync?

@aklausmeier hadn't gotten that far - good Q. I did keep PW UX Prefinement on calendar, but we've been mostly canceling it lately. @FranECross let's discuss with Amanda, and see how everyone feels about collapsing the meetings. Main action out of that would just be to make sure that if we have design / research projects for Public Websites, that we give Dave advance notice enough to get them on the agenda to get them in the agenda to address in this context. Good topic for all the team forming stuff next week.

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 4/4/24

• Why does this meeting exist? Quick explanation for new attendees - @davidmpickett (5 min)
• CYQ2 UX priorities - @jilladams (10 mins)
• Research pipeline updates - @aklausmeier (10 min)
• Service Location designs - @thejordanwood (15 min)
• Prefining Service Location tickets - @davidmpickett (15 min)

Why does this meeting exist?

• Read through the top of this ticket

CYQ2 UX priorities

Cross Team Efforts

• Icons - #17738
  • May not be ready for teams to start on
• New Breakpoint - #17746
  • Tentative removal date is August
  • @FranECross to follow up with Design System for more details
  • Need a new design and new build for every product?
  • We have 33 products
• Events
  • May have implications for some Facilities work

Facilities

1 VA Health Chat 2 Vet Center IEF removal 3 Vet Centers 2.0 (needs scoping) 4 Multiple Photos on Facilities 5 Mobile VAMC Design 6 VBA Editor Research (National phase) 7 Featured Stories

Research pipeline updates

Sitewide UX Research pipeline Now:

• Amanda finishing tree test analysis for VA Health chat this week
• Jordan running research discovery for Vet Centers 2.0 / VBA events
• VBA editor signup: Jordan will run session, Amanda to observe, next week likely.
• Mobile VAMC Clinics: Amanda running research discovery

Next:

• VAMC Dashboard usability testing - now ticketed, not current priority.

Later / Blocked:

• Facility Locator research: needs Staging build
• FL auto suggest research: needs FL to be hooked up to LH V1 and have adopted

Service Location designs

• Ticket: #17489
• Design: VAMC - Service Location Headers
• Notes:

"Name of office or location" needs to be required. But only filling out that only displays a header. Building name / number, Wing/room number are not consistently available, makes helptext hard to define.

DECISION: Name field is required Building name / room number fields will not be required

Service Location tickets to pre-fine

• Ticket 1: #17600
• Ticket 2: #17632

[jilladams]

• [x] @jilladams to update #16686 with updated priority order of UX projects based on comment above

[FranECross]

@davidmpickett Here's an item from Public Websites for the 4/11 Sync meeting: [UX - TESTING] Test PW managed apps/features/products against a 640px breakpoint #17762 Thanks in advance! cc @thejordanwood @jilladams

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 4/11/24

• (3 min) Review agenda and assign notetaker
• (10 min) Breakpoint testing Sitewide
• (5 min) Update from design system meeting Facilities
• (15 min) VA Health Chat & Heath Connect research findings Facilities
• (15 min) Refine Service Option text ticket Facilities
• (5 min) Update on Vet Center 2.0 discovery Facilities

Breakpoint testing - @FranECross

• Discuss overall effort and priority
• Refine #17762

Notes: Randi will stand up an env next sprint Jordan will have PTO and typography auditing to do. Sprint 3 is prob first opportunity to design review breakpoints.

Update from design system meeting - @laflannery

Notes:

• when you select a facility type, not all have a service type. Select box is disabled. DS component doesn't have that option,they're against it. We asked if they can add it.
• Mobile first: stacks everything.
• Proposal: hide the Service type selector rather than show it disabled.
• Laura / Jordan/ Amanda to follow up on updating the FL 2.0 design for that case.
• @thejordanwood to cut the ticket for design updates for this.

We also have an X to clear, in the City/state/postal code field. They are open to us contributing that change back to DS.

Use my location link is actually a button.

Design changes will go to DS for review, and might affect search / filtering in general across VA. (e.g. on GI Bill page) Changes do not need to go through Collab Cycle for review.

Priority: Not urgent, doesn't need to happen immediately. But: any changes here should be included in a prototype we build for mobile map testing.

VA Health Chat & Heath Connect research findings - @aklausmeier

• Share findings #17620
• Refine #17436

Notes:

• Link to synthesis
• Goal: to find the best places to display links to learn more about VA health connect and VA health chat
• Expectations were very clear results and consistent for both VA health connect and VA health chat -> Generally, Veterans validated the planned placement #17436 in the Manage your healthcare online box
• Future work: Design updates supporting their expectations for information to be available on Make an appointment and Contact us pages #16009

Service Option text ticket - @davidmpickett

• Refine #17600

Notes:

• Dave will clarify changes to make the work actionable by engineers. Basically:
  • Align Drupal selection with expected FE wording
  • Adjust wording for VAMC virtual support
  • Remove "Virtual support - yes , with or without an appointment" option as there no clear use case for this

Update on Vet Center 2.0 discovery - @thejordanwood

• 17667

Notes:

• Secondary research synthesis
• Gaps:
  • Understanding of Vet Center and Regional office events
  • Veteran understanding related to IA and services for Satellite locations

[davidmpickett]

Notes for 4/18/24

Vet Centers 2.0 (40 min) Facilities

First problem we're going to try and solve is the visual distinction from VAMCs, because it's the biggest design problem with the most questions. (Epic = #17893)

For side nav / Reusable Q&As / Events: those are sort of known quantities that need less deep thinking.

So next step is:

• 17891 in Sprint 3

• VAMC Editor research (10 min) Facilities

• Laura's spreadsheet of awesomeness

• Refine #17488 (5 min) Facilities

[davidmpickett]

Notes for 4/25/24

Basic intro to meeting structure for Michael - (5 min)

Punted

Let's all look at what Jordan mocked up for #17680 - (30 min)

Noted that Figma Dev mode is now within paid seats, so Eli has had issues analyzing designs for things like spacing during builds. (FYI @thejordanwood @davidmpickett ). So these kinds of annotations will have to be handled by someone on the team with a paid seat. In general: we will follow DS for spacing recos.

Reviewed design to date. Flagged a few items for follow up in Figma annotations.

• Need to confirm that Facility selection appears on Create and Edit Vet Center facility services
• Need to understand what happens when we remove a Facility Service from a Vet Center -- does that archive the Facility service?
  • Are Facility Services not associated with a Facility valuable? should they be archived?
  • Are Remove & Delete the same?
  • What does Remove do if not?
• Need to discuss character counts and help text a bit more in the Figma

Does @laflannery have to sneeze (aka remember the question she mentioned she might have in scrum)? We'll find out - (? min)

This was re: content release on Service Locations tugboat, and it worked. So no sneeze.

[jilladams]

Agenda for 5/2

• Basic intro to meeting structure for Michael/Carissa - (5 min)
• Events v2 - (15 mins) Public Websites
• Discharge Upgrade Wizard - (5 min) Public Websites
• Vet Center 2.0 - (10 min) Facilities
• Phone Numbers - (15 min) Facilities
• Refine #17118 - (5 min) Facilities

Events v2

• 17871

• Background info
• IIR coordination

DUW

• Refine #18029

Vet Center 2.0

• 17661

• Discuss epics and tickets

Phone Numbers

• 17854

• Refine Drupal implementation tickets (need to account for Label)

Refine 17118

• 17118

[FranECross]

Notes for today May 2, 2024

Events v2

• Amanda: there is a current product for events. We didn't know if we were going to iterate or rebuild the whole thing. There's another team - IIR - they help from time to time on tickets. They did some research / discovery and identified a couple of areas we can improve upon. They have a mural of research discovery. They have early design iterations of potential solutions. IIR team will meet with product folks, Jill, Amanda to level set on their vision and hand-off. Then Fran/Dave C can realign on the scope. Amanda's idea for Carissa is that she can pick up where they left off. She can get to know the product.
• Dave P: That's basically it. We're waiting for things to come back to us and this is a great opportunity for Carissa to familiarize herself with that. Jill has peppered links into convo earlier of examples of existing events. Here's an example from Dave: https://www.va.gov/chicago-health-care/events/. We'll get her other links to product overview.
• Jill: Change from Events v2 > in 2022 when Michelle was still the FE product lead at ad-hoc for facilities. There was a project to create filters, and for that effort they called that for Event's v2; this is used in code and documentation. We'll go with Events v3 (Amanda okayed for now as a placeholder). Fran/Jill to change all instances of Events v2 (for our new endeavor) to Events v3.

Discharge Upgrade Wizard

• Ticket Fran created to review the edit buttons on DUW because it causes a confusing experience for veterans to have their responses deleted and they're put back through the questions.
• Fran to add Mural link to this ticket

Vet Centers 2.0

• Initiative/Super Epic #17661
• Dave provided context: A facilities product. Build and initial rolled our in summer 2021. 300th completed in Jan 2023. Unlike some of our other products that previously had website and we modernized them, these didn't have any websites. No content migration. Since then, we have not as a Facilities team had the time, capacity or priority to make updates. We are not starting to approach that horizon. As the tip of the spear we are not putting our brains on revisiting, how they are designed, known issues and how we might resolve them.
• We think it's a great thing for Michael S to run with; and feel free to totally change how anything is organized (Initiative, etc.). Four problems to solve (see list in initiative); Jordan looks at previous research and synthesized that.
  • Dave's synopsis on Vet Centers: they are different; veterans get confused; there are other types of vet center locations that are in a secondary locations page and not discoverable. No way for veterans to easily express their interest to visit one. They were shipped without events, but they do have events.
  • Vet Centers are the best kept secret of the VA. Veterans can get help with mental health support groups (not medical related) e.g. horse therapy, fly fishing. Pretty unique (not helping with paperwork). Community driven.
  • Dave did more work to clearly define one of the problems: How veterans can distinguish vets centers from medical centers.
  • Veterans like that what they share isn't shared with the VA or elsewhere.
  • You can't get prescriptions.
  • They are NOT medical centers.
  • The epic #17893 is really for the front end of the pages... the page you get to after you use the locator.

Phone Number Field Issue

• There are phone number fields in Drupal that only use one field for a phone number, which isn't good because people will enter in different ways e.g. extension, etc.
• Break it apart one for phone number and one for extension
• Something we need to determine is, if we look at the staff phone number, we are hard coding the label. When we switch, there is a field for phone, extension and label. There could be different phone numbers e.g. regular phone number, after hours phone number.
• • How do we want to do this in Drupal? Is there a Drupal way we can handle this? Can we use the phone paragraph type in Drupal and hide the label? Make it non-editable? What are our Drupal options? If there aren't any, then we need to think of FE options.
• Dave provided examples
• Christian: The content type and the field name, if we know a unique piece of data we can trigger this one we can do it in Drupal.
• Laura: The Staff one we can move on. There is no help text on that field we can port over. It's real basic; I don't know if we want to add help text to that when we add it.
  • Dave: When we use the interface, it will come with help text. For staff, we don't need to do anything other than the help text that is brough with it

Not sure which ticket the comments below belong to:

• At a bare minimum we need to do error validation on save to catch letters/symbols not allowed
• Character count isn't displayed and should be added so the editors know when they are close/reach it.

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 5/9

• Look at Vet Center design? #17891
• Talk about Typography audit? #17806
• Refine

  • 17515

  • 17966

  • 16472

  • 18025

  • 18030

[FranECross]

@Dave Pickett For consideration to add to the Sitewide UX Sync meeting agenda ☝🏼 UX stories in our backlog (I may have already shared one?) (I also posted in the DSVA Slack Sitewide UX channel for visibility). cc @jilladams @thejordanwood

• [Events] [UX] Recurring events "View other times for this event" shows past recurrences
• [Discharge Upgrade Wizard] [UX] Provide design/UX logic to display questions after Discharge Year "Before 1992"
• [PACT Act Wizard] [UX] Determine if PAW should have a review screen for Veterans et al to review answers before final Results screen

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 5/19

• Review agenda, assign notetaker and timekeeper (5 min)
• Walk through of Vet Center differentiation design exploration - @thejordanwood (20 min)
• Vet Center 2.0 UX ticketing philosophy - @davidmpickett (10 min)
• Amanda PTO next week - @aklausmeier (5 min)
• Refine some Vet Center 2.0 tickets

Vet Centers are not medical centers, ya hear?

• 17891

• Figma

NOTES:

• Shortened intro text
• Added logo
  • Michelle to confirm with Jessica which logo version to use
• Summary box using pattern from Benefits Detail Page
• Moving 24/7help box to parallel to main phone
• Relocating irregular hours note to sit with hours
• Reframing prparation accordions to be questions with content-style-approved copy
• Spotlights: moving to be inline with DS guidelines
• Referral > Recommendation services
  • Suggested copy for describing the usage

Reviews from RCS: Michelle intends to review designs with Jessica / Barb and have us present. Probably not at June onsite due to PTO / stage of progress. RCS review and Collab Cycle review need to work together and understand each have their own trump cards in review process.

Vet Center 2.0 UX ticketing philosophy

• 18098

• 18125

NOTES:

• Initiative epics
  • Sub epics for themes of a design -- these will be more sprint-sized typically
• Amanda/ Jill frequently use the epic view.
• WE can keep an eye on the "ACs achieved / value delivered per sprint" situation that was leading to weird points math previously
• Jill, Michael, Fran, DaveP to sync on ticket thinking to make sure we're aligned
• Figma comments are collab / ideas, not directive

Amanda PTO next week

Notes

• going to Cali for kiddo graduation, woo!

Vet Center 2.0 tickets to refine

• [x] #18122
• [ ] #17695
• [ ] At what point do we want to do Design Intent? https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/80518
• [ ] #17194

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 5/23

• Assign notetaker
• Vet Center 2.0 - Satellite locations - @thejordanwood (20 min)
• Vet Center 2.0 - IA - @davidmpickett (15 min)
• Spotlights on Vet Centers - color and grid (10 min)
  • https://dsva.slack.com/archives/C06S9DADEUB/p1716313396255239
  • https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/18126
• Refine some tickets

Vet Center 2.0 - Satellite locations

• 18121

• Notes:
  • "How are we different" box should move below "On this page"
  • Need to choose whether we are using action links or active links for "See all locations"
  • Design removes some headers, puts phone number in one line
  • It removes some language that might be more self-evident
  • CAIA has guidance to make links distinct from headings, rather than header links. We're going to try to design with this in mind.
  • Michelle has a meeting relating to which kinds of satellite locations should get their own pages.

Vet Center 2.0 - IA

• 17195

• Notes
  • Adds Events list
  • Events pages under that list
  • Locations list
  • Outstation
  • CAP
  • ~Mobile Vet Center~
  • Also, a Bad idea to add a "System landing page"
  • Michelle agrees it's bad
  • Menu links should be the page H1, per CAIA
  • Level 3:
    • Where do we need to use the name
    • How do we determine the menu?
    • Main vet center in the menu? (Not like VAMC)
    • CAP
    • Not controlled by VAST
    • Naming conventions are now in place (in KB), but pre-existing ones have a lot of variation.
    • Mobile Vet Centers
    • No pages of their own.

Spotlights on Vet Centers

• Color https://dsva.slack.com/archives/C06S9DADEUB/p1716313396255239

• 18126

• Notes:
  • To do: add a class to the spotlights
  • Laura will determine where it needs to be.
  • Some changes were just made to fix the columnar strangeness.
  • The card does very little: border and padding, only.
  • We can determine how to constrain it for our purposes.

    Tickets to refine

• 15349

  • Jordan can refine this asynchronously

• 17695

  • Dave will refine asynchronously

• 17966

  • Bug bash
  • Foundational testing (not blocked by bug bash)
  • Design review (should they all go together or wait until all the testing/bug bashing is done?)
  • We hold this until the other testing is done.

• 18197

Typography

• Noting: Laura / Jordan did round 1 testing. Amanda offered to help for round 2.
• Jordan returns from PTO 6/6
• Laura will be in DC for the onsite 6/10-6/13
• Amanda may also be at onsite? Just realized I don't know that.
• Added to agenda for DST sync

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 5/30

• Review agenda and assign notetaker
• Removing Inline Entity Form on Vet Centers
• Review board and prioritize UX tickets

Inline entity form

• 17929

• Admin users should not be able to archive Required services
  • Proposed solution to remove 'Archived' option for editors so they are no longer able to control Required services.
  • Removing this functionality as a standalone improvement and does not have other dependencies / impacts
• Non-admin users should not be able to unarchive a Required service
• Users can tell if a service is Required or not
  • Jordan has designed new grid if required or optional, while adding as draft/published state. Notice of why you can't archive will also be supplied so editors understand why they cannot archive Required services.
• Removing Services
  • This is being sunset, replaced by the functionality of 'archive' or 'unarchive' services. This will be reflected in the 'Edit' actions
• Users can see and edit required services
  • true today, will be updated to new tab with same functionality
• Users will be able to archive optional services
• Manage number of nodes as PO
  • already possible
• Epic level
  • inline editing form will address several of the Blocked issues; Dave moved to 'blocked' to indicate there isn't anything else needed to address
• Next likely to be picked up: #17676, #17674, #18003

• 17840

  • Relevant KB articles?
  • Materials to provide VA for awareness
  • Prep folks for Vet Center Office Hours

Review board

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms#workspaces/sitewide-ux-660b03e631d26904d60775f5/board
• Next Sprint Planning may be bumped up due to DC offsite; may also be asynch prefinement
  • @thejordanwood working on Vet Center design explorations
  • @cmmerrill on Events (once @FranECross determines Prod direction)
  • Need to determine IA work for @davidmpickett

[FranECross]

Agenda for 6/6

• [Discharge Upgrade Wizard] [UX] Identify content and placement of text telling Veterans they may apply online or download a form #18154
• [Events] [UX] Provide error message text for Events filter #18197

• 18268

• Typography Update?
• I have a question around VAST and the addresses pulled in. I'd like to confirm an assumption for my mobile clinic design explorations. we can allow editor to select checkbox to hide default address or for mobile clinics do this automatically and require editor to enter a mobile schedule including address and hours
• Meeting next week?

Discharge upgrade wizard

• A tool where Veterans can answer a series of questions to get customized step-by-step instructions on how to apply for a discharge upgrade or correction. For example, if it was less than honorable they can ask for a review to get it upgraded to honorable.
• This is an immediate need to update the wizard that's in production. There is an online application that we can point to.
• @FranECross will spelunk to figure out which results pages show DoD Form 293 and provide an example in the ticket, then @thejordanwood will show how to add the online form info to these pages.

Events error messages

• Carissa did some exploration and found several error messages that appear. No error message displays if no interaction is made to the date boxes. Basically, the error messages aren't showing at the proper time.
• This may be a logic problem.
• This could be a DST problem to solve, since this is using their component. @cmmerrill is going to ask if this is a problem they are aware of. We could potentially contribute this back if it's far out in their backlog.
• This component can't be tested in Storybook. An engineer will need to look into this.

Static map images

• Laura did Vet Center audit and had suggestions on how to improve the map.
• There's a ticket for design improvements that don't fall into the branding, locations, or events design upgrades. This has been added to that ticket so that it can be reflected in VC mockups. #18098
• @laflannery is going to talk to @Agile6MSkinner about this to get it refined.

Typography audit

• Review instance currently not working. More updates to come on this.

Mobile clinics/VAST

• Mobile clinics have some info in VAST, like the address they park at. VAST is usually the source of truth on address (unless it's a CAP). We have an interface where custom addresses can be added.
• Is it possible to let editors add a custom address instead of using the facility address? Possibly even multiple addresses with multiple hours?
• There's a lot to consider about how the custom address data is stored.
• Christian says: This sounds like a service location.
• Where do mobile clinics tend to park? Answer: Assumption is they park at a community location, not a VA location.
• @aklausmeier is going to look into how CAPs are handled to see if that content model could work for mobile clinics.
• Dave did a nice presentation where we all learned about how mobile clinics work in Drupal and FE. This brought us closer together as team.
• @davidmpickett VAST = Veteran Affairs Site Tracking
• Mobile clinics are exempt from Facility Locator (for now) because their addresses aren't correct

Meeting next week

• CANCELLED
• The "left behind but not forgotten" crowd will use this time for self reflection

[davidmpickett]

Agenda for 6/20

• Events on Vet Centers - @thejordanwood
  • Events is no longer part of the Vet Centers 2.0 build, but should be part of design
  • Events should use existing functionality
  • Placement between In the Spotlight and Services
  • Satellite locations -> get events too? -> if so get their own listing page?
  • @mmiddaugh to ask Vet Centers about having one event listing page or multiple
  • How many events can be previewed on front page? Is it a featured event, or just the next event -> @thejordanwood to ask engineer
  • Wording of "AT Nashville Vet Center" on listing page
• Discharge Upgrade Wizard review screen - @thejordanwood
  • Review screen for DUW was designed based on Income Limits, not complex enough for DUW
  • Jordan's first pass includes an alert on pages that would impact flow and the review screen
  • Wants gut check on path
• Vet Center 2.0 CAIA review - @davidmpickett
  • @aklausmeier has sent blue box and intro sentence to Danielle review
• Review churn
  • Figma comments not overwhelming
  • For future - maybe have fewer review ACs and trust that questions are addressed as needed
• Tickets for next sprint?
  • https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/17695
  • https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/16906

[davidmpickett]

Closing in favor of a Slack List going forward https://dsva.slack.com/lists/T03FECE8V/F079N7QEZ45