Summary
The mere idea of interacting with the DMV or the IRS makes any of us groan. But what if a dysfunctional government service is what’s standing between you and the ability to keep your house, feed your family, or get a kidney? Hear from Marina Martin, the most recent Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, about the trials, tribulations, and ultimate successes of her team’s fight to get usable healthcare application into the hands of our nation’s Veterans. She’ll cover key tactics for leaders in bureaucracies of all sizes to prioritize and drive the end user amid regulations, red tape, and committee meetings through stories from her five years in the federal government.
Key Insights
-
•
Despite 20 million veterans, only 8 submitted health care applications online due to convoluted forms and inconsistent hospital systems.
-
•
Veterans often face steep barriers from multiple disconnected VA websites and numerous logins, totaling over a thousand sites and dozens of credentials.
-
•
Direct conversations with veterans, like Dominic, revealed critical UX pain points invisible to VA staff focused on brute forcing paperwork.
-
•
Veterans want straightforward, easily understandable digital experiences over complicated government websites.
-
•
The vets.gov platform instantly enrolled 369,000 veterans, demonstrating the power of user-centered design in government.
-
•
Cross-silo collaboration between doctors and claims processors enabled a system that translated complex medical exams into legal disability decisions quickly.
-
•
Bureaucratic resistance to cloud computing was overcome by rigorously fulfilling all security paperwork and demonstrating improved investigative access.
-
•
Engaging with bureaucracy’s existing processes instead of circumventing them ensures sustainable transformational change.
-
•
Veterans prefer the option to personally tell their story during appeals, but need clear, honest information to make informed choices.
-
•
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Designers often come out of schools without ever doing competitive analysis or considering existing design patterns."
Kit Unger Jackie Ho Veevi Rosenstein Vasileios XanthopoulosTheme 2: Discussion
January 8, 2024
"Teams can thrive when iteration and responsiveness are normalized and psychological safety is present."
Mariesa LenzWhat Beekeeping Taught me about Product Teams
October 29, 2025
"Having a huge appetite for research and a huge manner for research is a good problem to have. So let's lean into it."
Jesse ZolnaInviting the Whole Org to Come See For Yourself
March 30, 2020
"Propose new IC roles like a design problem: identify the need, gather research, and try it as an experiment with retrospectives."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"AI is a great automated assist, but it is not yet an insight generator like we hope for in UX research."
Louis Rosenfeld Billy Carlson Jon Fukuda Maria TaylorHow AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
October 3, 2023
"Systems thinking requires collaborating with diverse stakeholders rather than working in isolation."
Sheryl CababaExpanding your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
March 28, 2023
"When there’s dispute over what to measure, use that as an opportunity to discuss the behavior you want to change and the value capture."
Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi JainKey Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”
November 13, 2024
"Design operations provides the connective tissue running through different kinds of projects, making sure we have the right resources and processes."
John DevanneyThe Design Management Office
November 6, 2017
"We use frameworks in Mural that come with built-in instructions enabling asynchronous facilitation."
Erika FlowersIntroduction to MURAL for UX
June 11, 2021
