[CAIA Intake] Disability Benefits: Submission Experience

[mengA6]

Content, accessibility, information architecture (CAIA) new initiative collaboration request

We are mid-way through the design phase of this initiative, and we could use content, accessibility, and information architecture feedback in general. At the moment, the ask is fairly broad, but there are a few spots we could point to when we meet where we know you could help us refine some particularly rough content.

About your team

• Team name: Disability Benefits
• OCTO product owner: @emilytheis
• Product name: 526 Disability Benefits Application
• Product manager: @pacerwow
• Slack channel: benefits-disability-design
• Dedicated content writer on your team (if you have one): none
• Dedicated a11y specialist on your team (if you have one): none

About your initiative

Many Veterans do not have a positive experience when submitting a claim for disability compensation. There are multiple issues that describe errors, confusion, a lack of clarity, missing information, and cognitive load that isn't conducive to the level of quality we aspire to provide for Veterans. This feature focuses on improving the submission experience starting at the point when the Veteran clicks "submit" on a disability benefits application on va.gov and ending when the claim is established in VBMS and all initial doc uploads succeed or the submission process ultimately fails.

More in our feature brief.

Which of these descriptions best fits the work we’ll partner on?

Select all that apply.

• [ ] Digitizing a new form
• [ ] Creating a new digital tool
• [x] Updating an existing form or tool
• [ ] Translating a form or tool into Spanish
• [ ] Adding new unauthenticated content to VA.gov
• [ ] Updating existing unauthenticated content on VA.gov
• [ ] Something else: insert description

What's the nature of your initiative and desired outcomes?

We are redesigning touchpoints with Veterans including screens and emails that happen after a Veteran clicks "submit" on a disability benefits application. We are considering success, backup path, and multiple failure scenarios.

We are / will be coordinating with other teams on this, notably the Veteran Facing Forms team, My VA / Authenticated Experience, and Benefits Management Tools.

Success looks like:

• Improved clarity in the outcome of claim submission on the UI post submission
• Prevention of submission of duplicate claims via va.gov
• Confirmation/acknowledgement email of successful submission
• Veterans better understand how to track their claims (Claims Status Tool)
• Veterans have access to an outline of copy of their information and list of documents submitted

Collaboration timeframe

Note: We work on nearly every OCTO product and manage all unauthenticated content on VA.gov, so we will need to prioritize intake requests based on overall workload and VA and OCTO priorities.

Is this work tied to a Congressional mandate, change in law or policy, or upcoming event with a specific deadline?

• [ ] Yes
• [x] No
• [ ] I’m not sure

Where are you at in your timeline?

Tell us briefly about what you're working on now (such as initial discovery, wireframing, or usability research planning) and add any known dates for upcoming milestones or deadlines.

Completed an initial round of detailed design for the success path. Midway through flow design for failure path. Roughly 40% complete with design of the entire initiative.

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

• [x] Yes

• [ ] No

  *Note: **If you check yes, we’ll reach out to discuss details about the content in the react widget. We use these widgets to display entry points for new products to a certain percentage of users who visit our static pages. Please refer to this GitHub reference for dynamic content.

• [x] I acknowledge that if I change the launch to be incremental, or change it from incremental to 100%, I must notify CAIA of this change as there is additional work involved that may impact deadlines.

Collaboration cycle

Which phases of the collaboration cycle have you completed?

Select all that apply.

• [ ] Design intent
• [ ] Midpoint review
• [ ] Staging
• [ ] None. This initiative isn’t going through the collaboration cycle.

We are going to do further strategizing of our release plan (which portions we release when, how we split up functionality into releases) before we begin the collaboration cycle

Collaboration cycle ticket

If you’re going through the collaboration cycle, provide your ticket number and link:

• Ticket Number: xxxxxx

Supporting artifacts

Provide links to any supporting artifacts that can help us better understand your initiative and begin collaboration. Include artifacts like your product outline, user flows, mockups and prototypes, or any draft content.

• Feature brief
• Mega epic (we might organize this differently, but plan to provide a link to the top-level entity for the project from it if this source of truth changes)
• Figma file

Next steps

• [ ] Post a link to this issue in the #sitewide-content-sitewide-content-accessibility-ia slack channel and tag @Terry Nichols, and we’ll then acknowledge receipt. We'll then review the artifacts in more detail and work with you to determine timing for collaboration. Depending on the work, we may schedule a kickoff meeting to better understand how we'll partner together.
• [x] Review the remaining next steps in the VFS team tasks section here.
• [ ] If you also need engineering support from the public websites team, fill out their intake request form as well: Open a public websites intake request
• [ ] If you're requesting a page/URL redirect, a URL change, or a vanity URL, submit an additional request for this work: Open a redirect, URL change, or vanity URL request
• [ ] If you're creating an experimental design, also contact the design system team: Read more about experimental designs
  Suggest an addition or update to the design system team
• [ ] If you're requesting a11y support for usability research, submit a research support request next: Open an a11y research support request
• [x] If you are requesting content support, please share your content source of truth (preferably as a SharePoint document). Figma file

[mengA6]

slack thread

[laurwill]

Hi @mengA6 , thanks for noting that you're working with the Veteran Facing Forms, My VA, and Benefit Management Tools teams on this work — I took a quick look at your Figma file, and there's a lot of overlap with the project to add post-submission statuses to My VA.

Here's some initial notes and questions as you continue your explorations:

• You're working on the same problem as the VFF and My VA collaboration (lack of clarity about what happens directly after a Veteran submits a form), but you're describing the post-submission step differently than the content in the My VA prototype.
• Your Figma explorations tell the Veteran that after they hit submit, "We're sending your claim to the Veterans Benefits Administration for review." I see why you described it this way, and we explored similar language like "sending" in the post-submission statuses work. The problem is that "we" in that sentence includes VBA and all other parts of VA. We use "we" and "us" to refer to VA and all its offices in all of our website content, and we don't refer to VBA or VHA as separate entities. When a Veteran submits a form on VA.gov, they should think of that as submitting the form to whichever office or person within VA needs to receive it. So if we use "sending" in this content, we would have to say "we're sending it to ourselves." That's why we used "Submitted" as the status label in My VA and "We'll prepare your form for review" to describe what happens next. (We haven't validated that language with user research yet, so it may change.)
• This frame shows a suggested change to the claim status list — adding "Sending claim" as Step 1. We've had lots of conversations in the My VA post-submission statuses project about how the new "Submitted" and "Received" statuses on online forms will relate to and interact with the statuses in the CST, but this is still an open question. For now I'll just note that if you add a new step 1 in that process list, we'll have to add that step to the process list in the CST as well. And since claims don't appear in the CST until they have "Claim received" status, I'm not sure how that would work.

Do you have a regular touchpoint with the My VA, Veteran Facing Forms, and Benefit Management/Claim Status Tool teams? These projects are so closely related that I want to make sure we're all staying aligned. I'd also suggest connecting with the Benefits Decision Reviews team if you haven't already — we recently worked on similar updates to the Board Appeal confirmation screen and related emails.

[mengA6]

Thanks a lot @laurwill.

In your earlier message, I edited the "this frame" bullet to link to our Figma screen that I think you're referring to.

I think you have the wrong link on "content in the My VA prototype", but I'm not sure which screen you mean to link to there (it's currently linking to our screen). Could you edit the comment again to clarify?

[mengA6]

That info about how we use "we" and the thinking you have been involved with is very helpful. I'm chatting through the submission model (terms for various statuses) with our stakeholders today. One issue for us with "preparing" is that we have a scenario in disability benefits where the initial synchronous submission doesn't work and we go through a backup path that takes (usually) 2-3 days before it completes. We were thinking of using "preparing" earlier in the process to describe what we have to do there before the claim is sent. Disability benefits claims are tricky because they depend on a combination of synchronous and asynchronous processes, and there are different kinds of backup processes if the primary paths fail. So we might need to extend My VA's model.

We don't have regular touchpoints with those teams, but I agree we should. I'll look into that soon.

And since claims don't appear in the CST until they have "Claim received" status, I'm not sure how that would work.

We have questions about this but are working with the idea that with Show status of form submissions to users on My VA and confirmation page #1170 , and this slack message from Matt Dingee :

Submitting a form triggers the pending status in MyVA. The idea is to link from the success message in the Confirmation page, the last step of a form submission, to the Benefits Applications section in MyVA where the status can be tracked. There should not be a delay between that submission and something appearing in MyVA - that's the goal.

…My VA and CST would reflect a "pending" status before a claim is received in the future.