Phase II: Discovery and Planning

Last Updated: December 18, 2024

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!

💡 Building a Research Base and Starting with Design Artifacts

The goal of this Phase is to build and set up the resources, processes, and planning you’ll need to have in place to begin efficient digitization work.

We recognize that this is already Phase II and that you might feel that there’s still no actual digitizing going on. The next steps we recommend – learning and documenting, building user flows, mapping out needed APIs, and planning out ways of working – should help set expectations with stakeholders and allow your team to work more smoothly and predictably.

⭐ Steps

Step 1: Collect and share resources

• Create a shared team folder of critical resources in your team’s GitHub repository (for example, the product outline created during phase 1).

• Look at the research repository for related research.

• If you’re in contact with other teams that are digitizing forms, share resource contacts and links:

  • Design System

  • Forms Library

  • Relevant APIs

  • Schema (or data formatting)

Step 2: Perform a gap analysis

• Discover where the use cases are not meeting real-world expectations of performance

• Work with UXR

• Work with the VA form owner/stakeholders

• Conduct or find existing usability testing of the form

Step 3: Draft user journey(s) & prevent silent failures

• This will help stakeholders visualize and understand the experience of the users of the form before and after digitization

• Keep it high-level

• Note the “before and after” from the perspective of the user(s)

• This should show how the user experiences using the form across channels (for example: how does someone find the form, and what do they have to do after submitting it to actually complete the task?)

• Leveraging your product team’s zero silent failure plan, make sure to visualize and plan how to contact a form respondent if there is an error in form processing and/or remediation is needed.

  • An email address and/or phone number must be required on all digitized forms. 

Step 4: Determine if this work requires a pattern, component, or template not already in the Design System

• If your team feels that digitizing this form might require the creation and use of a custom/bespoke pattern or component, this might require your team to participate in the Experimental Design Process. This will entail working with the Governance Team on this pattern or component.

• If you think this might be the case, reach out to the Veteran Facing Forms team to discuss existing patterns, components, and templates. They might have some useful ideas.

• Begin the Experimental Design Process, if necessary.

Step 5: Research and build user flows

• Identify the necessary content and steps.

• Simplify the form if possible (work with stakeholders to get sign-off up front).

  • Is this content no longer needed and can it be removed?

  • Is this content duplicative of other information that’s been supplied by related forms?

• Identify existing design patterns.

• Identify if new design patterns are needed.

• Be tool-agnostic

  • Whether your team works at high or low fidelity, the focus at this stage in on how users will move between and complete tasks, not on code or screen design.

• Use Design Pattern resources if working in design tools.

• If using Figma, use the Annotations library to make notes about accessibility, conditionals, etc.

Step 6: Prep format agendas and language for VA form owner/stakeholder touchpoints

• Document agendas and language for your team to help plan and conduct regular stakeholder meetings.

• We recommend scheduling bi-weekly meetings. Use good “housekeeping” practices and if there are no agenda items offer to cancel meeting instances when there’s nothing to discuss or report out a day ahead of time. 

• Use outcome-first storytelling.

Step 7: Identify external integrations

• There are VA APIs you may leverage to support the successful completion of forms. You can find these APIs documented on http://developer.va.gov . Some of these APIs include names and addresses of VA facilities, direct deposit management, VA Letter generation and more. Consider your form needs and see if you can help save developer time and increase form accuracy by leveraging one of these APIs. 

• Once a form is submitted on VA.gov , it is sent to a backend system for processing. Teams should identify which system is responsible for processing the form, as this will determine which API to use for submission. To find the most appropriate solution, consult the External Services Integrations Glossary

  • If the form is a Benefits form (VBA) and can be mailed to the Evidence Intake Center at P.O. Box 4444, Janesville, WI 53547, you can typically use the Benefits Intake API. However, be sure to confirm this before proceeding.

• Try to find documentation/use cases on existing form APIs either by searching code repositories (vets-website, vets-api) or by asking stakeholders for contact with their engineers.

Step 8: Plan in “chunks” to scope appropriately and balance workload

Think in stages of what you plan to deliver:

• What are the complex or difficult features of the form?

• What’s the least complex but functionally complete (for the user) version that you can deliver?

• How can you build the first functional version that makes adding the complex or difficult features easier?

• How can you pitch this plan to the stakeholders?

• Create an "Enhancements" initiative for the harder-to-use features

🔮 Continue to phase 3 →

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