A Guide to Digitizing VA Forms
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PLEASE NOTE This guide recently transferred ownership and is now maintained by the Veteran Facing Forms team. We’re working through some revisions and encourage you to submit an issue ticket if you have feedback about how we can improve this guide!
Welcome to the Forms Digitization Guide!
This guide is designed to help your team plan for and work effectively to digitize VA forms.
Based on the work of teams that have gone before you to research, develop, test, and launch forms for numerous VA services and benefits, we've arranged steps and best practices involved in the design and digitization process. Have feedback about this guide? Submit an issue ticket for the Veteran Facing Forms team. We look forward to your input.
What qualifies as a form?
Within the VA, a form is any tool, application, or feature that asks for a user to input information with the intent of having that information evaluated and the user receiving a response.
If that definition fits your team’s product, then you should use the VA Forms Library to design said product (along with the rest of the design system’s components). If there are patterns, templates, or patterns related to forms that don’t seem applicable to your product/user needs, we recommend reaching out to the Veteran Facing Forms team via Slack (#veteran-facing-forms) to discuss before beginning the experimental design process. Some form components or patterns may seem unnecessary or onerous, especially if you have a very short tool or very long application. In our experience digitizing forms within VA, consistency of the form experience is a high priority, but we always welcome conversations and consultation with product teams to grapple with these worthwhile questions to cultivate the best service design possible.
Ready To Get Started? Continue to phase 1 →
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.