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Helping 70 Million Eligible Users Access Veterans' Benefits

About a quarter of the nation's population, approximately 70 million people, are potentially eligible for veterans’ benefits and services because they are veterans, family members, or survivors of veterans. With such an extensive reach, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) realized that the Web would be a critically important channel in helping them reach their constituents.

The VHA developed a pilot version of the My HealtheVet (MHV) portal to serve as the gateway to veteran health benefits and services. While launching the portal was a step in the right direction, they needed to improve its functionality, increase its offerings, and develop a highly usable experience prior to a national rollout. NavigationArts partnered with ATSC to work on this important project. Specifically, NavigationArts was tasked with creating the web strategy, information architecture, and visual design for MHV, a patient-centered health portal for veterans.

Since the primary target audience, the nation’s veterans, spans a range of ages and includes users with physical limitations, the user interface needed to be easy to use, easy to read, and easy to learn. The ease-of-use needed to extend not just to the visual portal framework and navigation, but also to the interactive screens in the portal for a consistent user experience.

Based on the project requirements, stakeholder priorities, and best practices, the NavigationArts team created new site architecture for the portal. They detailed how a user accesses content, including key navigation devices, global, local and contextual navigation, indexes, site maps, and search capabilities. The team also addressed the MyHealtheVet extensibility and growth plan for navigation – considering best practices as well as the VHA’s priorities for extensibility, support, and growth.

When a plan had been established and approved for the site architecture, the visual design team began work on a clean, elegant face for the portal. The design challenge in this project was to take a complex site and create a dynamic, yet simple, interface that maximized usability. Finally, the constraints of the technology --and what effect those constraints would have on the design-- were taken into consideration.

Using an HTML prototype of the redesigned site, NavigationArts conducted one-on-one usability test sessions with veterans. The main goals for the usability testing were to validate the global information architecture, “Can a user find the information they are looking for?”, and the graphical user interface design, “Does the user understand how to navigate the portal using the various buttons, links, and other visual cues?” The test participants generated positive feedback and results with clear definitions for improvement. The information architects and visual designers made specific changes – namely prioritizing links, and adjusting labels – as a result of the testing.

Project results included:

• Collaboration and communication to mitigate the risks of designing counter to stakeholder expectation or end user perspective
• Development of an internet strategy to create a highly usable experience, and an extensible user interface
• Establishing an information architecture that allows veterans to interact with information and manage their own healthcare experience
• A site foundation that is extensible, allowing for the introduction of new information, tools, and services into the portal information architecture framework, as the VHA continues to offer additional services and functionality
• A user interface design that is clean, easy to read, and patriotic; complies with VA and VHA branding and federal accessibility guidelines
• Usability testing based on an HTML prototype to validate redesigned site