Phase IV: Design Feedback and Testing
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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!
💡 Let’s Move Through the Collaboration Cycle
The goal of this Phase is to prepare you for the processes and work involved in getting design, content, and prep feedback as your form goes through the rest of the collaboration cycle.
⏮️ What Your Team Should Have Completed/prepared Before Starting This Phase
🧑🍳 What Your Team Will Have by the End of This Phase
Data schema set up
A walkthrough of the form’s logic for branching paths
Figma design file set up using the New Form Template
Content for all your screens (in draft form)
Draft IA direction
Rough mockups or initial prototype
All artifacts required for remaining stages of the collaboration cycle.
Feedback and sign-off on design, flow, QA, and analytics through all remaining collaboration cycle touchpoints.
⭐ Steps
Step 1: Schedule design intent
Learn what you need to have ready for design intent.
Design intent may not be a required step in the Collaboration Cycle: After you complete the request to schedule the Collaboration Cycle kickoff, the Governance Team will let you know if they recommend the Design Intent step or not. If your team has been through multiple Collaboration Cycles, you can request to skip that step, too.
Design intent is conversation-focused: The goal is to help your team answer questions about how to meet standards that will help you deliver a better product with less effort. Prepare for collaboration, not judgment.
Step 2: Review Research Repository
If the Collaboration Cycle process recommended your team build a Research Plan, search or browse through the existing Research Repository to see what processes and methodologies other teams have used and to what result.
Note that Research Repo has no label for “Form” or “Forms”, but does have labels for specific forms. If your work is related to another form, search for its name.
Note that the Research Repo does use labels for research methodologies (such as “usability testing”.
Step 3: Design Intent meeting
Review guidance for the meeting
Have the following artifacts prepared:
User flows (see guidance)
Research plan (optional)
Any others you wish to share
Prepare to discuss:
what decisions your team made and why
the research your team has conducted
Step 4: Governance Team may recommend the Experimental Design Process
Become familiar with the Experimental Design Process.
IF your team may need to design and/or build a new pattern or component, the Governance Team may advise you enter this process. Be aware this can add overhead to your delivery process.
Step 5: Build and/or finalize mockups
Create mockups that enable your team and teams you demo with to walk through a full interaction with the form.
Include how the user’s path may branch, depending on the form’s logic.
You can think of these as your interaction flows tied to UI patterns from the Design System and Forms Library plus your bespoke patterns (if needed).
This will serve as a way to demo and test how the final form will function to the user.
Step 6: Incorporate collaboration cycle feedback
Make sure to plan a sprint to work on this, or at least be sure that work arising from the design intent meeting will not throw off your quarterly planning.
Prepare and ask clarifying questions if needed.
Step 7: Through VA form owner, connect with the appropriate Primary Legal Contact (PLC) at the VA to review language in the form
This is to ensure that all language in the form meets regulatory requirements
Start early with Form Owner on this
Each Business Line has a PLC
The PLC’s recommendations may not conform to Plain Language guidelines so your team may need to balance their needs and CAIA’s recommendations.
Step 9-14: The rest of collaboration cycle
Research review and/or midpoint review
If the Governance team requires it, hold the research review before the midpoint review. Read through the descriptions of each touchpoint on the Platform site to determine what your team needs to prepare for each.Prepare to need a whole sprint to incorporate feedback from the midpoint review.
Request Analytics Review
Read about how to prep for the analytics review on the Platform site. This occurs only if the Governance Team has recommended this stage (this information is in the Collaboration Cycle Request ticket).
Contact Center Review
This is an asynchronous review that occurs only if the Governance Team has recommended this stage (this information is in the Collaboration Cycle Request ticket). Read how to prep for the Contact Center review.
Staging review
This is a synchronous review that occurs only if the Governance Team has recommended this stage (this information is in the Collaboration Cycle Request ticket). Read how to prep for staging review.
Requires dev time to put form into appropriate staging environment so it can be tested and reviewed.
Privacy Readiness Review
This is a required asynchronous review process after your form is in staging. Read more about how to prep for the privacy readiness review.
🔮 Continue to phase 5 →
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.