Creating a single, robust digital site for Veterans' needs

The task

To address this problem, Ad Hoc worked with the VA for three years to design, build, and launch Vets.gov with a consistent layout and single login for more than 25 benefits and services that the VA provides. This beta website, separate from the original VA.gov and developed from the beginning with Veterans' input, gave users a direct path to the services and information they needed most.

Because of Veterans' overwhelmingly positive experiences with Vets.gov, the VA merged that simple, accessible, and responsive site into a brand-new VA.gov that has since served as VA's front door and has further increased the public's trust in the VA.

The challenge

In building the new VA.gov, we wanted to eliminate confusion for users by reimagining the VA's digital services as one cohesive experience, designed from the perspective of the people VA serves: Veterans, their families, and caregivers.

Together with the United States Digital Service (USDS) and VA stakeholders, Ad Hoc's goal was to rebuild VA.gov to:

• Expertly guide Veterans through complex processes with simplicity and empathy using human-centered design.

• Efficiently migrate existing VA services to VA.gov without any interruption in service.

• Reliably identify and authenticate Veterans while ensuring privacy and securing sensitive information.

What we did

We spent a lot of time listening to Veterans and observing their struggles with the existing VA.gov site. We used insights from those sessions to lay the foundation for the new VA.gov.

To get features to Veterans quickly, we set up a team structure and technical infrastructure for agile, iterative development. We released new features on VA.gov daily and created feedback loops for quick input from users. We worked with our VA product owners to prioritize new features and bug fixes that were most impactful to the people using the site.

Building VA.gov on top of existing VA enterprise and legacy systems allowed us to focus on transforming the user experience without having to revisit internal operations or processes. By creating an API between the user experience and the enterprise systems, we could easily combine information from multiple systems and determine where VA needed to invest time and effort to address unmet user needs.

With direct access to the Amazon Web Services cloud environment, our DevOps team had the ability to create easy, automated scaling. Using a cloud environment for a project of this size ensures that services can expand to meet demand and contract to save resources. This also allowed us to automate our infrastructure and deployment processes and helped us to move rapidly and confidently make changes. Without automation of testing and deployments, we wouldn't have been able to keep pace with users' needs.

As a result of this work and collaboration among stakeholders, we were able to consolidate the various VA sites into one robust, easy-to-use digital resource for Veterans, their families, and caregivers. This new, efficient site included all the most heavily accessed tools and services:

• Disability, healthcare, and education benefits
• Facility locator
• GI Bill® comparison tool

Outcomes

With the VA and fellow partners, we presented a completely different way to build a website. By focusing on the customers' needs and developing content based on that information, we were able to accomplish several significant results:

• After the launch, VA.gov served more than 2.5 million unique active user accounts, with more than 100,000 average transactions every weekday.
• Reduced login help requests by 95% through user research and testing.
• Reduced wait time for Veterans by 54% for disability claims processing.
• Decreased page load time from 5 seconds to 2.8 seconds and increased user satisfaction by 5%.

We continue to develop VA.gov based on Veterans' feedback and as technology changes. But our goal remains the same: to provide continuous support to the VA to ensure all Veterans and their caretakers receive the highest level of support and service they deserve when visiting VA.gov.