The challenge

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is working to improve the confusing experience many Veterans have when navigating multiple VA sites built on a mix of legacy technologies.

Having launched a reinvigorated VA.gov in 2018 as an important step to a unified Veteran-first digital platform, the agency still needed to build out a common content management system (CMS), establish consistent descriptions for services, and organize the information in an accessible way for Veterans in need of health care.

Client goal

The large-scale pilot effort focused on using one of the regional VA Medical Centers as a model for all future VA.gov content. This would empower the VA to:

• Provide better healthcare management and scheduling online
• Explain benefits clearly and provide intuitive paths to apply for them
• Help minority and women Veterans find services specific to their needs
• Provide online connection with care coordinators
• Establish a model for content publishing and governance VA-wide

We integrated the new CMS with the existing site architecture and helped create standards for content and design that make it easier for VA staff to do their jobs—while directly improving quality of life for millions of Veterans seeking health care and benefits.

Our approach

Working alongside our partners Agile Six and Nava in collaboration with the U.S. Digital Service at VA and other organizations, our team was one of many moving parts in a complex project. We provided technical leadership and modeled transparent communication practices that helped the various teams work effectively together.

The technical strategy shifted to a “decoupled” approach partway through the project, requiring us to integrate the new CMS backend with the VA’s existing frontend system so that Veterans and caregivers could access content across multiple platforms. Agile practices helped us navigate this and other evolving priorities in a large ecosystem undergoing significant changes.

Smooth the technical transition

We managed the move to the new CMS without “pausing” the old site so the VA could re-use their existing front-end technology instead of starting from scratch. This meant we had to juggle content being served from two sources (GitHub and Drupal) during the transition, while training VA staff to use the new CMS effectively. We also set up a CI/CD pipeline for automated testing to ensure healthy functioning systems.

Find out what people need

To make sure health services and benefits are easy to find and understand, we tested navigation and content with real people, including unique groups like women, minority, and LGBTQ Veterans. We also interviewed VA staff responsible for maintaining the website, to understand their pain points and develop authoring and approval processes that make their jobs easier.

Empower a Veteran-first approach

The VA has been working to pave the way for a Veteran-focused digital experience, and this project was a landmark moment in propagating that approach throughout the organization. Human centered design and plain language are no longer the sole purview of digital experts — we developed systems that allow VA staff across the country to participate in the modernization of service delivery.

CivicActions, along with our partner Fearless, facilitated Drupal 10 upgrades across the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) suite of websites, bringing improvements for editors, better security and accessibility, and community contributions to streamline upgrades for large- scale Drupal. The new Claro administration theme is cleaner, clearer, and more accessible.

The new rich text editor CKEditor 5 provides many UI enhancements and an improved user experience. The most significant change from previous versions of CKEditor is that editors must now use a predefined set of elements to configure the content, which leads to fewer instances of invalid markup patterns making their way into the published site. Since invalid or non-semantic markup is often the cause of accessibility issues, this is a major upgrade. In addition, the improved Layout Builder experience makes it easier for content editors to control more complex layouts, while still keeping consistent with CMS Design System standards.

The 8 sites included in the upgrade, which occurred ahead of schedule, were: CMS.gov; Medicare.gov; Openpaymentsdata.cms.gov; Data.medicaid.gov; Data.healthcare.gov; SDIS.medicaid.gov (internal CMS site); PFS.data.cms.gov (internal CMS site); QIC.cms.gov (internal CMS site); and Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov/provider-data).

The challenge

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) help millions of people every year find and enroll in health care programs. Planning a large-scale web and content management project to improve the customer experience of their multiple websites, the agency launched a design challenge for the vendors that were finalists for the contract.

We did a fast-paced collaboration with our partners Fearless and KPMG to submit deliverables in just 8 business days (including page designs, content recommendations, an API, and a clickable prototype with a smart chatbot). Our team won the challenge because the agency saw we could help them achieve their goal to better serve Medicare beneficiaries.

Client goal

The task was to redesign the Medicare Part D section of the medicare.gov website, which helps people understand insurance options for their medication needs. For all their digital platforms, CMS needs to:

• Meet public expectation for easily navigable online services
• Securely manage personal info and transactions for millions of beneficiaries
• Provide friendly online experience for people facing stressful health situations
• Serve diverse groups of users with competing wants and priorities
• Support agency staff in publishing clear and accurate public-facing content

Our approach

Within the time constraint for this compressed agile design sprint, we conducted lean versions of the activities we would normally do to make sure the site was effective for Medicare recipients. Daily collaboration among all team members, from Design to DevOps to Developers, allowed us to quickly test and iterate on every step.

We used Drupal as our preferred open source platform and the CMS design system, which builds on the U.S. Web Design System. Together, these tools provide a solid foundation for accessible government websites — a key goal for agencies like CMS that serve diverse and aging populations.

Human Centered Design played a critical role in our process of building a site that would be intuitive and useful to older Americans seeking information about their drug coverage options.

Understand the needs

We talked to real Medicare beneficiaries to understand the challenges they faced in navigating the site. Based on what they said, we created a key persona to drive our scenario-based approach — ensuring that our work solved real problems and created value for users. We also evaluated the existing site to see how well it met standards for usability.

Offer customized guidance

To help visitors feel comfortable navigating complex information about benefits coverage, we created several experience options for them to choose from. They could explore the site on their own, use the guidance wizard, or ask questions of the interactive chat bot. We also improved the Search function to deliver more relevant results.

Clear the path to success

We focused on removing obstacles to help more people successfully find the information they needed. This was done through intuitive navigation and labels, scannable and actionable content, and a refreshed, accessible design. We tested our solutions with users and iterated based on their feedback.

The challenge

The Georgia Board of Health Care Workforce (GBHCW) serves communities in the state with a focus on medically underserved areas. The agency provides data reports on the physician, physician assistant, and nurse workforce and funds loan repayment programs to recruit healthcare workers to underserved parts of the state. However, healthcare workforce planners were having trouble estimating and meeting demand for practitioners across counties --especially as the COVID-19 pandemic drew many of them out of Georgia and into various hotspot states. Additionally, without publicly-available data on healthcare workers, GBHCW struggled to inform medical facilities with potential funding and staffing needs."

The agency saw an opportunity to leverage the DKAN open data platform where they were already hosting their data, combined with custom data services from our team. We worked with GBHCW to create data visualizations and tools that make it easy for staff, medical practitioners, and the public to access the information needed to build a resilient and responsive state healthcare workforce.

Client goal

We were tasked with crafting detailed, easy-to-read visualizations for data provided by the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia Board of Nursing. We also built robust, multifunctional dashboards that allow data to be searched across physicians, physician assistants, and nurses. The dashboards needed to:

• Host and display data resources with user needs in mind
• Show the number of licensed healthcare practitioners in a given area
• Display data in a clear, user-friendly, and accessible way
• Be easily adaptable and sustainable with the constant influx of new data
• Reflect diverse intersections within the data (gender, race, qualifications, etc.)
• Help legislators make data-based decisions to improve the healthcare field

Our approach

Because other state agencies were already using the open source Drupal framework to publish and manage government content, GBHCW chose the Drupal-based open data platform DKAN for their data dashboards. The agency also saved time and money by utilizing an existing contract with us, adding new digital products to pre-built infrastructure.

As the core maintainers of DKAN, we provided research-based recommendations and custom data design and development services to make sure the dashboards solved the right problems for agency staff and stakeholders. The project was so successful that the client reached out to us with the intent to create more dashboards to display patient care and underserved areas data.

Build for real user needs

We brought a human-centered approach to the data dashboards, and used the React.js library to build intuitive visualizations. We listened carefully to the desired outcomes, researched user needs, then made suggestions for how people could best learn about the demographic makeup and overall distribution of physicians, physician assistants, and nurses throughout the state.

Deliver early and often

For the redesign of the data dashboards, we used agile sprint cycles with daily stand-up meetings to develop and implement small chunks of working software quickly. We used test data provided by GBHCW to create proofs-of-concept, with graphs and charts that made sense of the various elements we knew the client wanted to showcase.

Align and adapt

Meeting regularly with project leaders at the agency ensured that the vision and work remained in alignment. Together we reviewed work that had been done, checked if adjustments were needed, and responded quickly to evolving requests or new data. Staying in close communication ensured there were no surprises and the client goals were met.