VBA IA Request from Sitewide-Facilities

[mmiddaugh]

About your team

• Team name: Sitewide Facilities
• OCTO-DE product owner: Michelle Middaugh
• Product manager: Jane Xiong
• Designer(s): Jordan Wood and Dave Pickett
• Accessibility specialist: Laura Flannery
• Content writer: fields editors
• Slack channel: #sitewide-facilities

CAIA Support Request

Describe what you need in a few sentences:

• We're launching new modernized pages for VBA Regional offices and need IA support.

Which are you doing?

• [x] Launching a new page, tool, form, or app

Types of Support

What areas does your team need support in? Check all that apply.

IA

• [x] Page placement
• [x] URLs
• [x] Breadcrumbs and Left Nav placement
• [x] Redirects

Timeframe

We guide and work alongside teams across nearly every OCTO digital product. We also work with partners across VA to lead content migration and manage all unauthenticated content on VA.gov. And we're always working to expand the VA.gov content style guide and our IA and accessibility documentation. We need to prioritize all intake requests based on our overall workload and VA and OCTO priorities.

Tell us about your product's timeline. And we'll work with you to meet timeline needs as best we can.

Have you worked with CAIA before?

• [x] Yes
• [ ] No

What's your team’s next step and its timing?

• Our next steps are CMS content and FE builds
• Provide date if available: in progress now

Timing for your next step:

• [x] Next sprint - incorporating Veteran research into design
• [x] This quarter - CMS content and FE builds, followed by editors entering content for the MVP sites

Is this timing related to a specific event or Congressionally mandated deadline?

• [x] Yes - launch
• [ ] No

If you're conducting research, when is that starting?

Provide date if available:

• [x] Next week - Synthesis begins

Will you release this new product incrementally (for example, release to 25% of users to start)?

• the roll-out will begin with 7 Regional offices but these pages will be available to 100% of users. The react widget isn't relevant to this work

When do you expect to launch your product to 100% of users?

Please provide an estimated date so our team can create other relevant tickets.

• We expect to launch our product to 100% of users by 1Q2024

Collaboration Cycle

Will this work be going through the Collaboration Cycle?

• [x] Yes
• [ ] No

If no ...

• Skip to the supporting artifacts section, below.

If yes ...

Please provide the link to your Collaboration Cycle ticket:

• Ticket (number): Collaboration Cycle for Sitewide Facilities VBA Regional Offices #46029
• Collab. Cycle Ticket Opened (date): 08/22/2022

Please check all of the phases in the Collaboration Cycle you have completed:

• [x] Design Intent
• [x] Midpoint Review
• [ ] Staging

For planning purposes, please check all of the phases in the Collaboration Cycle you feel you might need CAIA support and guidance:

Design Intent

• [ ] Accessibility
• [ ] Content
• [ ] IA
• [ ] Translation
• [x] Already completed, no assistance needed
• [ ] Unknown at this time

  Midpoint

• [ ] Accessibility
• [ ] Content
• [ ] IA
• [ ] Translation
• [x] Already completed, no assistance needed
• [ ] Unknown at this time

  Staging

• [ ] Accessibility
• [x] Content
• [x] IA
• [ ] Translation
• [ ] Already completed, no assistance needed
• [ ] Unknown at this time

Supporting artifacts

Please provide links to supporting artifacts as available.

• [x] Product Outline
• [x] Finalized design prototype or mockup
  • VBA RO page mostly follows the patterns established for Vet Centers
  • VBA RO page annotated highlights areas where we are iterating on a pattern
  • Facilities Services shows the design for an expanded facility service accordion (Veteran benefits, Family member and caregiver benefits, Service member benefits, Other benefits). VBA facility services are based primarily on the current VAMC design.
  • Facilities Services annotated highlights iterations and additions from VAMC to VBA.
• [x] Content source of truth: This is a Drupal CMS product. Most content will be entered and maintained by local VA staff. Content will also include basic facility data (not editable in Drupal) and centralized content (created by editors from VBA Strategic Engagement for consistency across all sites and not locally editable).
• [x] Research plan
  • Synthesis and findings pending
• Any epics/issues that may be helpful:
  • New proposed VBA terms for Service Taxonomy + Content Review from Facilities #58511
  • Super Initiative - VBA Regional Offices modernization #13029
  • Initiative - VBA Regional Offices: Design & Develop MVP #10514
• please see additional context/history in comments
• Link to testing accounts (please do not paste them in this ticket): not relevant - these pages live in the unauthenticated experience

Additional Support: Collaborative Sessions

Have you already worked with someone from OCTO leadership?

• [x] Danielle
• [ ] Beth
• [x] Mikki
• [ ] Martha

How do you plan to work with us on this request?

• [ ] I’ll take this to Beth or Danielle’s office hours.
• [ ] I’d like to schedule time to talk about this.
• [x] Let’s work async and meet as needed.
• [ ] Schedule a kick-off call with your team and CAIA for your project (Recommended)

Accessibility Help in Slack

The #accessibility-help channel in the DSVA Slack, is also available to you as a resource. Everyone is welcome to ask questions or get help from our a11y (accessibility) specialists. Tag @Terry Nichols to get a11y help asap.

Next steps

Once you’ve submitted this ticket, please post a link to this issue in the #sitewide-content-ia Slack channel and tag @Terry Nichols.

[mmiddaugh]

VBA-specific context

• Many VBA locations are housed inside other VA Facilities. For example, the Houston Regional Office is located on the campus for the the Houston VAMC and the Anchorage Regional office is located inside the Anchorage VAMC building. Satellite Offices are more likely to be located in shared VA or non VA official locations than Regional Offices.
• Our VBA content model](https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/13096) does not include a separate content type for Regional Offices. The plan is to use the VBA Facility content type. Our research with VBA public contact staff indicated that there do not appear to be significant differences between Regional Offices and Satellite Offices from a service delivery perspective. We plan to treat Regional Offices and Satellite Offices the same, rather than nesting them in a side menu hierarchy.
• These Regional office pages will resemble Vet Centers more than VAMC pages. MVP will be a single page. Events are expected as a fast follow but we do not expect the pages to expands much beyond a relatively flat structure.

Considerations

• The IA path should reflect Veteran mental models rather than org charts and we want to avoid creating any sort of false hierarchy. Veterans may expect the URL to reflect scenarios in which a VBA office is physically located on a VAMC campus.
• The VBA Facility Naming Schema was created to solve the urgent need to convey the status of VBA “facilities” that are actually a VBA service provided inside a VA facility and to create standardization across regions. As a result, the naming structure reflects these colocation scenarios and will be embedded in the H1 of VBA pages and in the address block (ala JFK Federal Building in Jordan's design).
• Per the VA design system, breadcrumbs are not required if the site or experience has a flat structure (i.e. only 2 levels of content or less).
• There may be risk with overlapping content in https://department.va.gov/.
• Although this hasn't been the approach historically, there may be a use case to name-space the VBA URLs, (e.g. /regional-office) in order to make it simple to publish Full-width alerts across all VBAs easily. (This came up in the process of publishing PACT Act extension to VAMCs, where they are not namespaced.)

Capturing this detail for now but will ask @davidmpickett to add additional insight once he returns from PTO on 9/18.

[kristinoletmuskat]

Hey ya'll, I wanted to acknowledge that we got this ticket, and that I'm going to sync with Mikki on Thursday to get more background. stay tuned -- I'll hopefully be able to get you some decisions by next week, but lmk if that timeline doesn't work!

[davidmpickett]

@kristinoletmuskat Sounds great! Feel free to grab time on my calendar if you want to talk through any of this. There's a lot of context to unpack. I've been on this project since kickoff and happy to chat

[kristinoletmuskat]

Thanks @davidmpickett ! just requested access to your calendar -- I'd love to meet Friday if you're here!

[davidmpickett]

@kristinoletmuskat I have a PR in to update the Naming Schema documentation per our conversation today. Until then, you can preview the new table (with the generalized naming patterns).

[kristinoletmuskat]

Hey @davidmpickett and @mmiddaugh , here is the final IA spec doc we discussed today. It outlines the URL decision, and points to your source of truth for the naming conventions. Let us know if we can help with anything else!

[davidmpickett]

Thanks @kristinoletmuskat! Just added my notes from today on my corresponding ticket: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/15490#issuecomment-1758616883

[jilladams]

The first VBA RO has been published (https://www.va.gov/portland-va-regional-benefit-office/). Is this closeable?

[kristinoletmuskat]

I think so!