Design Intent - IA Feedback - Cartographers, MHV on VA.gov, MHV Secondary Navigation

[erinrwhite]

VFS actions

• [ ] Assign this ticket to the team member(s) responsible for addressing feedback provided by Platform.
• [ ] Comment on this ticket:
  • [ ] If the Platform reviewer has any Thoughts/Questions that require responses.
  • [ ] When Must feedback has been incorporated. As appropriate, link to any other GitHub issues or PRs related to this feedback.
  • [ ] When Should/Consider feedback has been incorporated, or if any feedback will not be addressed. As appropriate, link to any other GitHub issues or PRs related to this feedback.
• [ ] Close the ticket when all feedback has been addressed.

Thoughts/questions

• I agree there needs to be a "sense of place" across MHV on VA sub-pages, with some kind of indication or header on each page that you're in the My Health zone. The pages are not a linear form flow, and they're not informational pages; they're an app within an app, with lots of navigation around and between. Having an anchoring element would be helpful.
• I'm excited to see y'all seeking to make an improvement to the "in this section" component - and am hoping that your research will impact how we do sub-navigation throughout VA.gov. For that reason I am drawn to approaches 1 and 3, which would provide a pattern we can emulate throughout the site. (Yes, despite what I said in my first bullet about this navigation style being an unusual use case.)
• Option 3, specifically the mobile view, is strongest to me because it includes the navigation element as part of the MHV header, and brings that local navigation to the left side of the page rather than the right side, where the sitewide and auth navs are.
• I'm eager to hear about research with users. If there is a way to let research participants see all three, or at least two, options, I would be curious to understand how they compare.

Feedback

Practice areas will document their feedback on the VFS-provided artifacts following the Must, Should, and Consider Framework. Platform reviewers may also provide additional notes that don’t comment on the artifacts themselves but are important for implementation (eg. engineering/coding notes).

Consider

New header: We have a new federal header coming down the pipe. The team is still working to finalize design, and how might the changes we're seeing there impact design decisions on this product?

[sterkenburgsara]

@erinrwhite thank you for all the feedback! the new federal header is hard to consider/incorporate into our work at this stage since it isn't final yet and is still undergoing testing, but this is a great point and something I definitely want to keep our eyes on as we move forward.