Lives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government
Summary
Key Insights
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Despite 20 million veterans, only 8 submitted health care applications online due to convoluted forms and inconsistent hospital systems.
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Veterans often face steep barriers from multiple disconnected VA websites and numerous logins, totaling over a thousand sites and dozens of credentials.
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Direct conversations with veterans, like Dominic, revealed critical UX pain points invisible to VA staff focused on brute forcing paperwork.
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Veterans want straightforward, easily understandable digital experiences over complicated government websites.
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The vets.gov platform instantly enrolled 369,000 veterans, demonstrating the power of user-centered design in government.
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Cross-silo collaboration between doctors and claims processors enabled a system that translated complex medical exams into legal disability decisions quickly.
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Bureaucratic resistance to cloud computing was overcome by rigorously fulfilling all security paperwork and demonstrating improved investigative access.
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Engaging with bureaucracy’s existing processes instead of circumventing them ensures sustainable transformational change.
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Veterans prefer the option to personally tell their story during appeals, but need clear, honest information to make informed choices.
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Lessons learned at the VA regarding user experience and organizational silos are now being applied to improve foster care systems for 400,000 kids.
Notable Quotes
"Most people think that veterans in America automatically get health care. That is not the case."
"Only eight people filled out the online application out of over 847,000 pending."
"Veterans don’t use the internet was the common excuse we heard, but that was simply not true."
"Dominic had tried to apply 12 times and kept running into PDF and terminology problems."
"This new vets.gov site is extremely easy. I have not had this level of ease with a government website at all."
"Every experience at the VA is broken in its own way."
"By getting all the people in one room — doctors and claims processors — we had them demonstrate their processes to each other. Minds blown."
"You cannot just say, ‘Go learn the cloud tech in a weekend’ to someone who’s been an expert for 20 years."
"We wrote one great security narrative and then just copied and pasted it into every other piece of paperwork."
"We got an official memo from the inspector general saying they preferred logical cloud access over physical access."
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