Vets.gov
In 2017, we worked with our Digital Service team to design a single, effortless digital experience for Veterans by reducing the number of digital touch points and enhancing Vets.gov.
Vets.gov planned enhancements reflect a shift in the way Veterans and their family members interact with VA sites by making it easier to find and use information and tools. Our goals for the new site are:
- Unifying and simplifying VA’s digital touch points, dramatically improving customer experience
- Meeting customer needs on the first try, on any device
- Creating a mobile-first platform
- Retooling existing applications and designing new end-to-end experiences, in partnership with business owners across VA
- Providing transparency about our methods and processes
We worked with our business partners across the Department to enhance current Vets.gov functionality and make it even easier for Veterans to apply for benefits and health care, and comprehensively manage the services they need from VA.
Together with the VA Health Eligibility Center, we introduced a new digital application Veterans can use to apply for VA health care. Previously, fewer than 10 percent of applicants used the Veterans Online Application for
a simple reason: the form would not open for most users. The application was an editable PDF that required Veterans to use Adobe Acrobat 8 or 9 via Internet
Explorer. More than 70 percent of U.S. Government traffic comes from Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, meaning that more than 70 percent of visitors would have trouble accessing the health care application.
We improved our back-end process for developing and publishing online forms. What used to take our team five months to build now takes just five days, allowing VA to quickly respond to user needs and roll out new functionality to Vets.gov and Veterans.
- Access to additional memorial benefits
- A newly revised pre-need memorial benefits eligibility PDF form
- An upgraded Eligibility Office Automation System
