Veterans Benefit Discovery Tool
Company: Booz Allen Hamilton | Date: July 2024 - May 2025
Client: Department of Veteran’s Affairs, United States Government
Our client, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, contracted with Booz Allen Hamilton to develop an experience that would live on VA.gov that would help veterans get started in learning about the benefits they receive and how they can start applying for them.
Role: UX Design Lead
Technology: Figma, Mural
Background
The Department of Veterans Affairs contracted with Booz Allen Hamilton to create an experience for Veterans to more easily find and understand the benefits they receive from being veterans. This experience would live on VA.gov and would provide veterans with a solid starting point where they could start their journey.
The Experience
Try the experience yourself!
This project was done as a team of 2 designers; one lead (me) and one junior. We knew we needed a simple tool that didn’t contain many questions to ease the burden on users. The VA also has an extensive design system and mature design practice that we got the opportunity to work within.
This is the starting page for the experience. Users can get to this page by clicking the “Get Started” CTA on the home page banner.
We were very careful and thoughtful about our wording for the text on this page to make sure that it was clear to the user that this was an experience to help them get started, and wasn’t having them apply for those benefits through this experience.
We asked the user just 6 questions to give them incredibly accurate answers about which benefits they might be eligible for.
We ran several iterations of these questions through user testing groups of Veterans and Soon to be Separated armed forces members to make sure we were asking the most relevant questions and limiting how much time we were asking of the user to fill out this questionnaire.
The Disability question was a difficult one to word correctly — some veterans still have a stigma against it and some veterans don’t realize they can receive disability for things other than catastrophic injuries.
We originally had a 7th question which asked the user if they had already applied or used their Education benefits, as there were some benefits that needed to know that information. Upon further research and talking with veterans, we realized that the question itself was confusing (e.g. “Does it count as “having used” my education benefits if I passed them to my child?”) and wasn’t a key piece of information that determined eligibility for certain benefits. So we removed the question entirely.
On the results page, we wanted to focus on getting the user the information they needed, and to have that information at their fingertips as quickly as possible.
We included an info message at the top of this page specifically for Transitioning Service Members to obtain more information directly related to their separation. When a service member is separating, there is a lot of time sensitive paperwork that needs to be filled out.
We created this results page such that the URL that is generated is unique — this means that a veteran, transitioning service member, or a dependent can copy the link (either using the button or through the URL at the top) and return to this page exactly.
We learned, through interviewing workers at a local Veteran’s non-profit (that works with the VA) that this tool would be incredibly useful to them when working with veterans that don’t have a computer or smartphone to use online services. The workers could guide the veteran through this survey, and then print the results out for them to have.
For the results listed on this page, we categorized them by type for easier filtering by the user.
We worked closely with the VA Design team on this page to make sure that it met all of their internal design guidelines and all accessibility guidelines.
We made sure to include links on each result for “Learn More” and “Apply Now” - with the “apply now” being the more active/primary link to encourage users to apply.
During our user testing and research, we spoke with an internal VA employee about how users interacted with her department and how they applied for the benefits associated with her department. She said:
“We’d rather that [veterans] apply and be denied, than not apply at all…. we can’t help them if we don’t know they exist.”
That really stuck with our team; we tried to keep that quote top of mind for every experience we worked on.
The last main thing we focused on, was to identify which benefits were Time Sensitive. Some benefits can only be used before the service member separates from their branch. Some benefits need to be filled out or applied for within a set amount of time post-separation. We included special call outs for those benefits, and included a special filter for time sensitive benefits.