Background
The Department of Veteran Affairs is the agency of the Federal Government that provides benefits, healthcare and cemetery services to military veterans. I was brought into the UX Design team to help with the redesign of the My HealtheVet Admin Portal. Due to the sensitivity of the organization I can't share specific aspects of my designs publicly, but, I want to share my process, learnings and reflections during my time working with the VA. If you'd like to learn more about this project, feel free to contact me.
Key Deliverables
✅ Read and analyzed research data collected by previous team members.
✅ Collaborated closed and consistently with PMs, client, design and engineering to establish redesign goals every increment.
✅ Ran competitive analysis to identify opportunities and further concept exploration.
✅ Created wireframes and prototypes after integrating feedback from administrative users and stakeholders.
✅ Used Adobe XD for design, version control and smooth hand-off to developers.
✅ Leveraged UI components from the VA design system to improve designs.
✅ Leveraged previous designers work to maintain consistency.
✅ Contributed to and updated components in My HealtheVet Admin Portal UI pattern library.
✅ Presented designs biweekly to VA stakeholders to garner their feedback.
Learnings
👥Design is a team sport. When I joined the team I relied solely on research findings and content audits to redesign a section of the Admin Portal. Once I was done, I shared it with the engineers and discovered some functionality and features I had included in the prototype were not supported by the back end. Implementing them would have required a larger and multi-team effort. I made sure to consult with the development team early and often after that.
🧩 Information Architecture is a reliable friend when redesigning complex and highly specialized products. I wasn't a member of the team when the redesign started. I had to learn about the portal, different features and most common admin tasks on the go. What helped me understand the product better was auditing the existing content to understand the relationship between every piece of information in different pages and sections.
🖥 A redesign is not only about "freshening up and modernizing" the UI. In teams where UX is fairly new this can be a tough myth to beat. Sharing the design process, inviting team members to working sessions, usability testing with users, and communicating constantly with stakeholders and the engineers helped the team understand that a redesign can be a perfect opportunity to not only improve the look and feel of an interface, but also the workflow and overall experience of the end users.
