The United States Department of Veteran Affairs VetRide
Which has a 100 page style guide for proper logo usage. #themoreyouknow
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Prototyping
Visual Design
My Role
As a Consultant Designer I supported the development team tasked with building VetRide's web and mobile applications. I worked with a team of Developers and a Product Manager to create designs to be approved by a commitee at the United States Department of Veteran Affairs. (Who were an awesome client.)
Context
The United States Department of Veteran Affairs (US VA) had a process in place that was manual - individuals would call and organize rides for Veterans to see their doctors.
They were digitizing this process, with two individual appliations - a mobile app, to be used by drivers that would be employed by the US VA and a Web Portal to be used by the Veterans, and the Administrators behind the scenes.
I was brought in to Consult for the development team as they did not have a Designer for the Web component, but had previous designs for the Mobile Application.
Discover
My first step upon joining was to properly understand the process.
The core statement I have been given was:
"Help Veterans get a ride to their Doctor"
Which in sound simple, until you try to break it down step by step.
In reality, Veterans had to first get a ride to a distribution center that would then get them on a bus to the medical center that had their doctor. The service had an active radius around these distribution centers where the US VA could arrange a ride, they would pick up the Veteran and take them to the distribution center, get them to their doctor and then do it all in reverse.
During the Discovery phase we found that there was a hole - if a Veteran was too far away from a distribution center the US VA couldn't arrange a ride for them.
As the process was a pen-paper-phone process previously the administrators in charge of organizing rides had volunteers who would go pick up Veterans that were outside the range, and bring them inside it so they could by picked up by an official US VA shuttle.
This process was completely off the books and had not been accounted for in any previous designs.
Define
We worked with client at the US VA to vet all of our assumptions and had them help us outline what was in and out of scope, the shuttles were in scope but the volunteers weren't - as they were an unofficial part of the process.
The chief concern of the US VA was usability - the average user would be disabled.
We needed to gather personal information about the user separately from travel information.
They could bring companions.
Secondary contacts were critical.
Must have any accommodations passengers would need.
Design
My core approach was to create a guided experience with limited touch points. My goal was to prevent a user from ever getting lost once entering a flow.
I also made sure that the limited touch points were larger than average and limited information on views.
Previous
Next
On the landing pages / dashboard screens I aimed for no-click information gathering so that users didn't need to click to get status updates.
Deliver
The finished product does everything we set out to and helps Veterans recieve the care they deserve.
