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Celebrating Little-Not-So-Little

Here’s a little cupcake to celebrate the little-not-so-little things. Like completing a solid 9+ hours of qualitative interviews with Veterans.

It’s little because it’s a very small slice of the over 600,000 Veterans.

It’s not-so-little because the insights we gained that will help shape our product are huge.

It’s not-so-little because we involved our entire team (developers, designers, researchers, product manager) for the interviews.

It’s not-so-little because we focused on listening, absorbing, reflecting.

Having completed the interviews, we enter into analysis but we also get to enter into Alpha phase where we eagerly and hungrily will use the insights gathered so far to build and test prototypes with Veterans. Alpha is where we will talk to more Veterans, little-by-little.

Moving from Discovery to Alpha: it’s a little-not-so-little step deserving a little update.

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Discovery Findings Presentation

We recently went to Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) headquarters in Charlottetown, PEI where Raluca and myself gave a presentation on our Discovery Findings and where the project is heading.

Here's the slidedeck we presented to VAC:

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Charlottetown Area Office Visit

This past week while in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Raluca and I had an opportunity to visit a Veterans Affairs Area Office.

Area Offices are regional locations where Front Line workers such as Veterans Service Agents (VSA) and Case Managers help Veterans in person, online (via MyVAC), or on the phone (transferred from a national toll-free line). These offices are spread across Canada. 

Front line staff provide many services like verifying Benefit Application forms (to make sure everything is filled out correctly and all required documents are there) and connecting Veterans with various services provided by Veterans Affairs and provided elsewhere like community organizations.

Our visit was limited to talking to the staff and checking out the environment and layout. Generally, Veterans enter into a Waiting Area where a receptionist greets them, asks for identifying information (like an ID card) and ask them about the purpose of their visit.

From there, Veterans will meet with either a VSA or a Case Manager depending on the complexity of needs in a private room. 

We heard from many front-line staff that a veteran will usually meet with a staff seeking an answer to a single question, but that question leads to other questions and may reveal an underlying need or other factors needing to be addressed. There's definitely a need to do many different translations: translate the questions and information from a veteran into a need, and then translate/divide those needs into which services and benefits are covered, and then translate/communicate the benefit (in plain language) back to the Veteran so that the veteran can make informed decisions.

Sometimes, this process is done with the help of internal resources via the computer but we've heard that it can take a lot of time to research and aggregate properly. Those internal resources are not easily accessible when VSAs meet Veterans outside the office, in places that are more accessible for the Veteran (for instance at the Veteran's home). Outside of the office, a front line staff needs information quickly and reliably as they don't have the ability nor time to search multiple places for information.

Some of the things we heard that Front Line staff need in order to best help veterans:

1. Having the information that Veterans need and they need in a central place

2. Make the information easily accessible

3. Make the information searchable but make the search less "strict"

4. Information needs to be reliable (up to date)

5. Information needs to be shareable so that both Front line staff and Veterans can see the same information on their own.

6. Information should be used to support the veteran along their journey of accessing services and benefits (supporting information beyond what the benefit does like helping the veteran understand the process, the roles of the people involved, how to prepare for a meeting, etc.)

This visit was very insightful and we're so thankful to the staff for their time and insights and patience with our questions. We learned much about the environment of an Area Office and how staff help Veterans in the front-line. The information gathered will help us refine our veterans research plan and also help us as we build towards making an impact. Thanks also goes to our partner within Veterans Affairs, the Online Service Directorate who helped coordinate and arrange the meetings.

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Planning area-office research

CDS design researchers Hillary Lorimer & Mithula Naik moving one more ticket to the "done" pile. Both are equally skilled in getting to the heart of the matter and passionate ambassadors of the voice of the user; we've been lucky to get their expertise with the user research aspect of our project. This week, they worked hard to prepare for our first visit to a VAC area-office.

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Shaping observations into insights

During our first weeks of discovery research, our team has gathered an abundance of interview notes, quotes and observations. While our research activities will continue in different forms throughout the project, we have enough data to start analyzing our findings in order to assimilate our observations while they are still fresh in our minds and formulate ideas and hypothesis that will fuel the next steps of our project This week, we have grouped our initial observations based on their similarity to each other, creating an affinity diagram with color-coded post-its. As clusters were created around emerging themes and patterns, additional perspectives and insights came forth. While observations represent the raw data of our research, insights help us make sense of what we see and hear, assimilating our findings into a deeper understanding of the challenges we are trying solve and identifying opportunities for impact. As we are going to continue to gather user research throughout the project, our analysis of this data will also be a cyclical labor. We will be constantly gathering and analyzing data; filtering, sorting and interpreting. While it is an informal and lean way of documentation, using post-its allows us to keep the diagram flexible enough so that it can grow and evolve as we learn more about what works best for our users.

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Benefits at a Glance : A Brief Introduction to Our Project with Veterans Affairs Canada

Veterans Affairs Canada

Last summer, Veterans Affairs Canada’s Online Services team requested that the Canadian Digital Service help them develop Benefits at a Glance, a web-based directory of VAC’s benefits. The CDS agreed, and decided, with Code For Canada, that the project would be led by us, its first ever placement of fellows.

Veterans Affairs Canada is a department of the federal civil service mandated to assist ex-military, ex-RCMP, as well as some still-serving members of both, and their relations (a group I’ll refer to as VAC’s patrons) live a healthy and dignified life. It does so through its benefits which include compensation for injuries incurred in the line of duty, and career transition services. 

VAC offers upwards of forty benefits covering a variety of needs, only a handful of which are relevant to any given patron, generally. Sorting out which ones, how they work in concert, and how to utilize them effectively can often be an overly difficult task to perform, for patrons as well as department staff, to the extent that patrons sometimes go without the help they need and are entitled to only because they are uninformed, and not for a lack of trying.

Benefits at a Glance

VAC’s Internet resources have their strengths, but feedback suggests that their website lacks a meaningful and flexible way of filtering, sorting and searching through the broad set of benefits the organization offers. The department hopes Benefits at a Glance will bridge the gap.

Our collaboration with Online Services began in earnest in mid-November. They provided us with a set of documents introducing us to the project, and connected us with about fifteen stakeholders from across VAC, to help inform our direction. We decided, in response, to begin our work with a discovery phase, focused on learning about the problem(s) Benefits at a Glance is meant to address.

Interviewing our stakeholders and reviewing the documents provided — activities which themselves brought to light more stakeholders to meet and documents to review — we learned of hopes for Benefits at a Glance and difficulties related to finding information regarding benefits more generally, from a wide cross section of the department. We heard from case managers, front-line support staff from VAC’s call centre, benefit application adjudicators, benefit program managers, staff from the Veterans Ombudsman’s office and more. Also, we established a basic understanding of how VAC functions, its organizational goals, major initiatives, its IT infrastructure and web presence, and perused reports on patron-focused user research from recent years.

Thankfully two CDS design researchers, Mithula Naik and Hillary Lorimer, joined our project during this early stage, to help us conduct the interviews, sort through the resources we were absorbing, and document what we were hearing and reading.

Informational Needs at VAC

As we synthesized what we were learning, we came to identify five categories of informational need that VAC patrons and staff have trouble satisfying.

The first two needs are related to a widespread focus on VAC benefits:

1. Discoverability: The need to quickly find what benefits are relevant to a given patron.  2. Connectivity: The need to understand how benefits available to patrons connect up, that is, how they are dependent on each other for eligibility, and can work together in concert, including those offered by organizations other than VAC, like the Canadian Armed Forces.

The remaining three needs are related to a specific focus on a given VAC benefit:

3. Purpose: The need to understand how a given benefit addresses a patron’s life challenges in practice. 4. Process: The need to understand how to successfully apply for a benefit, including the need to determine eligibility conclusively. 5. Research: The need to understand what documentation defines a VAC benefit, from the departmental processes and guidelines that control how it is delivered to the legislation it's derived from.  

It is straightforward to imagine how Benefits at a Glance might help satisfy some of these needs in the short term — namely the first couple — whereas the others might require a complementary resource, or an intervention into how the department creates and organizes information about its programming at a more fundamental level (for instance, using simple, clear language, as opposed to legalese, when addressing patrons).

What’s Next

Now that we’ve established the contours of the project’s problem area well enough to navigate it and perceive how Benefits at a Glance might address it, we’ve started working toward an ETP (Earliest Testable Product). We anticipate that developing and testing it with stakeholders and potential users, veterans and internal staff, will be one of our major focuses for the coming months.

As for the informational needs that early versions of Benefits at a Glance likely wont address or help elucidate, we plan to examine them further via targeted research, which we’ll be undertaking concurrently. We hope that doing so will turn up ideas for how the eventual MVP can be extended or complemented, so that it might address the problem area more fully.

We also plan to document and report back to VAC on any interventions we come to see as necessary that are beyond the scope of the project (our fellowship ends in August), especially those that might significantly improve the quality of service the department provides its patrons, our ultimate goal. 

Until next..

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Using a Business Model Canvas to synthesize the information we’ve gathered so far.

This is a great way to summarize our understanding of the ecosystem and a first step towards identifying knowledge gaps that we'll need to supplement with additional research.

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We work in the open

How

Tumblr blog (here!)

Twitter: @le0nL     @danprime   @eneraluca

Through friends:     @code4ca**   @CDS_GC

Working regularly from public spaces: Friday's we're at Impact Hub

Why

Because we value transparency, collaboration and sharing

To document our process: discoveries, wins, failures and lessons learned

To prove that government doesn’t have to be a black box

To start conversations and make new friends

To show what is possible and how to get there

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Hello Canada and the world !

Welcome to our team blog! We're honored to be part of the first round of Code for Canada fellows! Stay tuned for our reflections and findings throughout the fellowship. 

- Dan, Raluca & Leon          

Daniel Tse - Product Manager

Daniel is a biomedical engineer and data analytics consultant. He has worked with the Government of Manitoba to design a digital tool to assess healthcare needs in remote communities.

Leon Lukashevsky - Developer

Leon is a Toronto-based developer and has worked on web projects with clients like the University of Toronto, The Globe and Mail, Sustainability Solutions Group and Influitive.

Raluca Ene - UX Designer

Raluca is a seasoned UX designer that has worked in digital innovation for over 12 years. She has worked with clients in a wide range of sectors including finance, education and healthcare.