A human-centered approach to helping Veterans adopt Login.gov
The challenge
Through VA.gov, Veterans can schedule doctor’s appointments, refill prescriptions, file for disability compensation, and communicate with their VA health care team. But first, Veterans need to sign in.
There are currently multiple ways to sign in to VA.gov and other VA applications, many of which don’t meet the required security standards. A bumpy login process is frustrating for Veterans and can make it harder or impossible to access their benefits. And an inadequately secure one can compromise their privacy and data. To improve this situation, we need to migrate more than four million Veterans from legacy credential providers to a safer, more secure sign-in option.
Veterans currently choose between four credentials when they sign in to VA.gov, MyHealtheVet, or other VA applications.
The VA recommends that Veterans without an ID.me or Login.gov account, start using Login.gov to access VA.gov and other VA applications. The goal is to allow users to securely access all VA services with a single credential, eliminating the need for confusion that comes from having multiple logins.
The challenge is to migrate more than four million Veterans to Login.gov.
The approach
As part of a larger team led by MO Studio, Blue Tiger provided senior-level user research and product management support to this effort.
Discovery
We conducted a 12-week discovery to understand how to migrate millions of Veterans from legacy credential providers to Login.gov. First, the team developed a research and recruitment plan including hypotheses, conversation guides, and scenario prototypes aligned with the research objectives. We conducted research at a VA Medical Center in Tampa, Florida with 37 Veterans. We used a variety of research methods, including scenario validation, service prototype testing, and contextual intercepts.
Synthesis
During synthesis, we elevated insights and created a future state service blueprint. Actionable insights included:
Knowing that humanized and dedicated support is available makes Veterans more motivated to set up and use a new credential
It's convenient for Veterans to verify their identity while they’re already at a VA Medical Center, rather than doing it online where they may encounter issues on their own
Building a roadmap
The Discovery phase uncovered useful insights and opportunity areas. In a one-day workshop with key stakeholders and business owners from VA and Login.gov, we shared our results and walked through a future state service blueprint.
Following this, we facilitated two days of workshops involving key stakeholders, including business owners, Login.gov product teams, and other experts across the VA.
In a follow-on workshop, we mapped out potential solutions aligned with different stages of the future state service blueprint. Through collaborative discussions, we improved our understanding of one another’s perspectives, identified obstacles, addressed uncertainties, and expanded our stakeholder maps.
Taking into account what we learned from the workshops, our team started to construct a comprehensive program-level roadmap.
We carefully reviewed the discussion notes to capture key points, ideas, and concerns raised by diverse perspectives in the workshops.
Then, we categorized the data based on recurring themes and identified patterns. For example, we noticed that many of the insights from the research and workshop outputs centered around the need for getting face-to-face help with setting up an account, verifying your identity, or learning how to use Login.gov with VA services. This defined one of our key areas of concern: In-person support.
The workshops also helped to inform our understanding of dependencies and priorities from VA leadership, allowing us to not only come up with strategies to address opportunity areas but also shape an effective plan for moving forward.
Ongoing research
As the team started to tackle opportunities identified during Discovery, we began conducting additional research. This would help us explore and test different ways of helping Veterans create a Login.gov account.
Deferred identity proofing
Knowing that identity proofing (or verification) is where we see the largest drop-off when people set up a Login.gov account, we started to explore an option that would let select Veterans with legacy accounts create a Login.gov account without identity proofing right away. This would only be available to Veterans who met certain criteria, such as those who had verified their identity in the past to get their legacy account.
We created a research plan that defined what we needed to learn through testing with Veterans. During this study, we hoped to evaluate usability, comprehension, and support. These were our goals:
Review whether Veterans can migrate to a Login.gov account without issue
Review whether Veterans understand the type of account they’ve created
Review what Veterans will do if they encounter an issue or where they will seek support
Based on these goals, we worked with the team to design two prototypes to evaluate different scenarios with Veterans. Then, we wrote conversation guides to lead the research sessions.
We conducted research remotely on Zoom with 10 Veterans.
After the research sessions, we synthesized our findings and defined 6 key themes to help tell a meaningful story about what we learned. We shared 7 key insights with our team as well as stakeholders across VA and at Login.gov. One of our findings, for example, was that Veterans don’t understand the difference between authentication and verification, which makes it difficult to understand what type of account they have just set up with Login.gov.
The results
This research directly led to recommendations for content changes, updates to our product and release strategy, the start of an email campaign strategy, and a plan for further research to better understand which phrases or terms will resonate most with Veterans.
Project team
Elizabeth Koch
Tyler Gindraux
Practices used
UX research strategy
Recruitment
Concept testing
Scenario validation
Analysis and synthesis into insights
Service blueprinting
Shaping a product roadmap
