Phase III: Initial Digitization
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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!
💻 Time to Start Digitizing
The goal of this Phase is to nail down the data schema, parse out the needs met (or not) by the Design System and Forms Library, and start building the foundations and first iteration of a digital prototype for the form.
The Steps below should give you a solid basis and deliverables to get you ready for the design intent phase of the collaboration cycle and presentations with your VA form owner/stakeholders. They might even be excited to see their product starting to take form, based on foundational thinking.
⏮️ What Your Team Should Have Completed/prepared Before Starting This Phase
🧑🍳 What Your Team Will Have by the End of This Phase
An understanding of the form
Buy-in from stakeholders on the goals of the digitized form
User journeys and user flows
Knowing what APIs are relevant and how to use them
More predictable and implementable steps for the work ahead
Data schema set up
A walkthrough of the form’s logic for branching paths
Design System and Forms Library usage set up
Content for all your screens (in draft form)
Draft IA direction
Rough mockups or initial prototype
⭐ Steps
Step 1: Identify the relevant Design System and Forms Library content
Build in time to evaluate your initial user flows and whether they can be achieved using existing Design System and Forms Library components.
If using Figma for design work, we recommend copying the New Form Template created by the Veteran Facing Forms team so your form file is set up and ready to go. You can find the New Form Template linked from the VADS Templates, Patterns, and Forms library.
Attend Design System Office Hours and reach out to the Veteran Facing Forms team (Slack: #veteran-facing-forms) as needed.
Use V3 of the VA Design System
You can also reference the Mock Form Patterns
Use the VA Forms Library 101
Read the Forms Library introduction.
Learn how to contribute back to the Design System.
Step 2: Examine constraints and document bugs in the existing forms
Examine whether the PDF forms you’re working on do or do not meet accessibility standards, starting with 508 standards.
The Veteran Facing Forms team has an accessibility specialist, please feel free to reach out to them on Slack (#veteran-facing-forms) if you have any questions.
If your team does not have access to an Accessibility Specialist, you can fill out a ticket with CAIA for more extensive help with this task.
Learn if the forms are XML files with a PDF wrapper (as many are).
Learn what software was used to create the PDF form.
Learn whether the PDF forms have built-in constraints (example: a field may only allow up to 30 characters).
Step 3: Get clarity on data schema
Invest the time to learn the existing data schema and propose changes if needed.
Review the developer documentation.
Identify questions to ask SMEs.
Connect with teams that have worked with these before.
Prepare to discuss, explain, and bring questions to VA form owner/stakeholders.
Step 5: Draft content & establish CAIA collaboration
Use the VA.gov content style guide as your starting point.
Talk with Sitewide CAIA about where the content source of truth for your form should live. Most popular options are a source of truth markdown file in GitHub or Figma design files (CAIA can use the comment feature of Figma to provide feedback without altering the design files directly).
Use this to keep (and update) content and findings throughout the rest of the phases.
Whatever options you choose for CAIA collaboration, try to maintain consistency of approach/process across projects.
We recommend getting CAIA’s “first pass” on your content before bringing that content to a collaboration cycle touchpoint.
Step 6: Establish IA direction
This effort ensures your form is findable by identifying where your form will live within the VA.gov experience and how users will navigate to it.
IA direction comes from CAIA.
Having this direction established prior to design research will ensure you can test findability with users.
Work with CAIA IAs to establish placement of your form within the site IA, any page level navigation elements, and primary entry points to your form within the experience
🔮 Continue on to phase 4 →
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.