Improving Veteran Benefits Tools for Accessible, Streamlined Claims Processes

Our Approach: Prioritizing Collaboration, Accessibility, and Transparency

To address the complex needs of Veterans and their families, Team Coforma adopted a structured, agile approach centered on human-centered design (HCD) principles.

Working across two primary workstreams—Decision Reviews and Benefits Management Tools—we collaborated with VA to create intuitive, accessible solutions that help streamline the claims decision and appeal processes for our nation’s Veterans. 

Each workstream served a specific function: the Decision Reviews team focused on developing the Supplemental Claim form, while the Benefits Management Tools team redesigned the claim status tool and developed the electronic download decision letter feature, enabling Veterans to track and manage their claims more effectively. 

Our multidisciplinary teams of researchers, designers, engineers, accessibility specialists, and product managers worked in unison throughout the development process. Following agile methodologies in two-week sprint cycles, each discipline contributed expertise to bring VA’s goals to fruition. Our cross-functional team collaborated closely on usability testing, conducting sessions with Veterans to identify pain points and validate improvements in real time. This research informed design enhancements and helped guide our efforts toward truly impactful improvements for Veterans. 

Across all workstreams, Team Coforma provided continuous accessibility testing on forms, tools, and features on VA.gov sites that needed to be updated to ensure any new issues were detected and fixed. Each round of testing involved in-depth analysis, including desktop and mobile views, screen reader testing, color contrast, and screen magnification. Our product design integrated technical features such as annotations and voice-over text, and emphasized an intuitive user experience for all. 

We also worked to identify and address broader usability issues through extensive usability testing with disabled Veterans. For example, we learned that when a vision-impaired Veteran is filling out an online benefits form, navigating from one page to another often results in the form title being read aloud, which can be disorienting. We then refined our approach to emphasize the specific section title on each page for better orientation.

Participating in VA-led “Collab Cycles” helped facilitate alignment and increase accountability throughout the project. This structured schedule involved frequent checkpoints in which our team presented designs, documentation, accessibility considerations, and ongoing progress for VA review. Feedback from these sessions, which incorporated insights from business and product owners, allowed us to iteratively refine our solutions to meet VA’s goals for this project. 

Prioritizing transparency helped our teams collaborate and communicate effectively. Using tools such as GitHub, we maintained detailed documentation so both VA stakeholders and project team members could easily track progress. This helped VA partners stay informed and engaged with each iteration, enabling us to collectively build reliable, Veteran-centered tools that meet the highest standards of accessibility and usability.