[CAIA Intake] VA.gov Chatbot: Teaser Content for Health Topics

[nathalierayter]

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

Use this ticket to request collaboration on a new initiative with the sitewide content, accessibility, and information architecture (CAIA) shared services team. Feel free to delete instructions and unselected options from the ticket to make it easier to scan.

Your team

• Product name: VA.gov Chatbot
• Team name: Chatbot
• OCTO product owner: Nathalie Rayter
• Product manager: Vrushali Patil
• Designer(s): Matt Terwilliger
• Slack channel: #va-chatbot-platform
• Dedicated content writer on your team (if you have one): Grace Goodenough (temporary surge effort)
• Dedicated a11y specialist on your team (if you have one): n/a

Your CAIA team:

Filled out by CAIA

• IA:
• Content:
• Accessibility:

Your Initiative

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
• [ ] 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
• [X] Something else: collaborate with Content specialist(s) on Danielle's team to create "teaser" content for a subset of health-related questions that Veterans ask the VA.gov Chatbot in order to more effectively answer their questions

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

Tell us briefly about your work and the outcomes you’re aiming to achieve. Right now, the Chatbot matches Veterans' questions to intents that respond using content from Drupal; when this content gets pulled over, it often has problems including missing hyperlinks, incomplete information, and missing context. We aim to asynchronously collaborate with Content specialists on the CAIA team to create new teaser content for frequently asked Health questions to ensure that we are effectively serving Veterans' needs.

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. FOR FIGMA/MURAL: please tell us which screens/board/section to look at so we don't leave comments on old stuff.

• Mural board of Chatbot Content Cleanup

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.

We are running an 8-week surge on content clean-up through late October; we are halfway through and now have a handle on what we need from CAIA.

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

• [ ] Yes
• [X] No

Collaboration cycle

Which phases of the collaboration cycle have you completed?

Select all that apply.

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

Next steps

• [ ] 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).

[nathalierayter]

@goodenoughgraceVA will share the content source of truth / collaboration document

[NaomiPMC]

@strelichl @laurwill @aprocik1 please connect with @DanielleThierryUSDSVA on this in the next team meeting and she can give you insights to how this needs to be approached.

[DanielleThierryUSDSVA]

Hi all. @laurwill and I met today and I explained the purpose of this effort.

To be clear, what we discussed wasn't that we would create teasers for specific questions. It was that we would create teasers about each benefit that we are already in the process of creating for the reusable content benefit model for core benefit content.

In that model, which @laurwill and I went through today, there are specific fields for a "teaser" for each benefit and an "intro" for each benefit's eligibility information.

So, for example, for disability compensation:

Benefit teaser: VA disability compensation (pay) offers a monthly tax-free payment to Veterans who got sick or injured while serving in the military and to Veterans whose service made an existing condition worse.

• This can then be paired with a link to the main VA disability compensation page with something like: Learn more about VA disability compensation

Benefit eligibility teaser: If you have a service-connected condition, you may be eligible for compensation. A service-connected condition means an illness or injury that was caused by—or got worse because of—your active military service.

• This can then be paired with a link to the main VA disability compensation eligibility page with something like: Find out if you may be eligible for VA disability compensation

This type of content can be sourced from either the benefit hub page intros or the work-in-progress content model in Drupal. And then they, of course, may need editing and we should share what we're doing here with SMEs for awareness.

It sounds like @goodenoughgraceVA is starting a doc to share. I believe I have a spreadsheet of the benefits and pages if that's helpful.

[goodenoughgraceVA]

@DanielleThierryUSDSVA and @laurwill Hello! Thank you for clarifying- @nathalierayter and I synced this morning and realized we could've worded our intake initiative differently. We understand we're creating teaser content for the benefits that are already being worked on for the reusable content benefit model.

With that said, here's the link to the shared doc we discussed: Chatbot and CAIA Collaboration

Feel free to review and add any comments or suggestions for the doc structure. We are still waiting on the top ~5 health-related chatbot topics from our data science team; I will populate those into this doc as we get them and make another comment when they're added.

If you could link the spreadsheet of the benefits and pages, we wouldn't mind taking a look! Thanks.

[goodenoughgraceVA]

Top 5 health intents inputted to Chatbot and CAIA Collaboration doc on 10/21/24. Tagged @laurwill and Sara Torres

[laurwill]

HI @goodenoughgraceVA , thanks for providing the content in the doc! I added some questions in comments there — for questions 4 and 5 (supplemental insurance and transition to VA health care), several of the intent phrases have more than one possible intent.

How does the chatbot handle ambiguous or multiple intents? It seems like we may need to further segment these intent phrases, or offer multiple answers for some of them. Happy to chat more about this! And it may be you already handle this issue outside of these answers — I'm not familiar with all the logic built into the bot.

[laurwill]

Hi @goodenoughgraceVA , I left you a few comments in the document — several of the questions have intent phrases with ambiguous meanings, so we'll need to confirm how the chatbot differentiates these intents before we provide final teaser content. Thanks!

[goodenoughgraceVA]

Hi @laurwill, I just posted replies to your comments. Let me know if this clears things up or if we should discuss further. Also, could you tag @nathalierayter or @patilvrushali in comments as well? Our temporary content surge effort wrapped up but I want to make sure we have eyes on all comments. Thank you! :)

[laurwill]

Hi @goodenoughgraceVA and team, thanks for the replies! My suggested edits and comments are in the document. Happy to chat more about the disambiguation options.