The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
Disability compensation is often the first VA service that Veterans encounter, setting a precedent for their future experiences. The 526ez form, one of the most-used and longest forms on VA.gov, serves as the primary avenue for Veterans to file service-connected disability compensation claims. However, the application process—including the form length, error messages, and required service information—has been challenging for Veterans, requiring an average of 1.73 sessions to complete. They must recall extensive healthcare information related to their condition and provide both VA and private medical records.
Despite many known pain points of the form, our team lacked comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end Veteran experience of filing online. We needed a full picture of the experience leading up to a large prioritization effort with our VA stakeholders.Our goal was to identify pain points and barriers to filing that fell beyond the scope of typical usability testing and provide insight into the holistic experience of completing the 526ez. Our findings would also support the validation and prioritization of design debt.
Much of the current effort around the 526ez focuses on stability, technical debt, and ensuring parity with the paper form. The team lacked a consistent and methodical way to validate our design debt, which can be as significant as technical debt for some Veterans, blocking access to their earned benefits. To address these challenges, we designed a research study to build a foundational understanding of the filing process and evaluate the current state of the 526ez.
We adopted a shadowing method, observing Veterans as they completed the form with their personal information in real time rather than using mock data and scenarios during testing. Shadow research, also known as contextual inquiry, was a new methodology for the VA ecosystem.
We focused on three main goals:
Additionally, our product team sought more data to inform the much-needed prioritization of work on the 526ez. Given the form’s size and complexity, identifying especially acute or common problems would aid in developing the roadmap for future improvements.
We conducted 11 semi-structured interviews via Zoom, observing Veterans as they filled out the 526ez form, focusing on their attitudes and expectations. During these sessions, Veterans shared their screens and verbalized their thoughts while using their personal information to complete the form with the intention of filing. This approach provided us with valuable insights directly from the Veterans’ experiences.
We allocated up to two hours for each session, recognizing that Veterans would be discussing sensitive topics such as disability, PTSD, or Military Sexual Trauma. Therefore, our team adopted a trauma-informed approach to support Veterans throughout the process. For instance, we asked, "What are you hoping to get out of this session?" and shared resources through our recruiter after the sessions.
Through these interviews, we identified several key pain points and barriers in the filing process. Here are some of our key findings, though this is not an exhaustive list:
These high-level findings highlighted the need for targeted improvements to enhance the overall user experience and ensure that Veterans can successfully complete their disability compensation claims.
Our research findings supported a prioritization effort for new initiatives on the 526ez. VA stakeholders identified two key recommendations for the team to address first:
Our pilot paved the way for other VA product teams to use the shadowing methodology to gain a new perspective on the Veteran experience. We presented our case study to the VA design ecosystem, highlighting the challenges and benefits of the approach. In addition to this impact, we as a team felt more equipped to advocate for the needs of Veterans in our everyday work.
While shadowing provided meaningful “real life” data, it took longer than anticipated to observe Veterans filing. When Veterans struggled with authentication or encountered an ITF error, we had no way to unblock them. Since we weren't using a staging environment or mock, some Veterans were blocked by authentication or other errors, leading to a loss of participants. To ensure an adequate sample size, we increased our number of participants mid-study.
Many Veterans expected the researcher to help them file, rather than just observe the experience. For future work, we will make sure our recruitment language sets clear expectations.
Contributor: Evelyn Hilbrich Davis, Sr. UX Researcher
