VA Platform Service Design: Helping teams at VA.gov adopt service design thinking

The VA.gov website serves as the single place Veterans can go to find, apply for, track, and manage the benefits they've earned. The Platform is the common infrastructure, technical and non-technical components, and processes that support the static and interactive content consumed by Veterans via VA.gov. And Platform teams are the people who provide the digital services to make it all possible.

These teams help VA build great Veteran-facing digital products and services by:

  • Maintaining the infrastructure to keep VA.gov up and running.

  • Ensuring that apps developed on VA.gov meet established standards.

  • Providing tools and support to Veteran-facing Services (VFS) teams so that they can develop stable, scalable apps quickly and securely.

To best support the Platform, people need the right tools and resources to do their jobs. The Platform Service Design team, where I served as the UX lead, was created to enable and empower Platform teams to embed best practices into their work through clear tools, guidance, and documentation.

My role

  • UX lead

  • Strategic partner to teams, facilitating participatory design and continuous improvement

Tools used

  • Confluence – to create and maintain a centralized knowledge base of best practices and service design resources

  • Mural – for journey maps, service blueprints, and workshop facilitation

  • Slack – for team engagement, announcements, feedback workflows, and cross-team collaboration

Skills applied

  • Service Design

  • UX Research

  • Content Strategy

  • Design Operations

  • Stakeholder Engagement

  • Workshop Facilitation

  • Strategic Communication

  • Systems Thinking

Goals

Service design, not bureaucracy

  • Service design on the Platform is intended to improve Veteran-facing services and the way the VA builds them, not create better bureaucracy.

  • Process improvements start by researching and documenting the problem and user stories.

  • Journey maps inform discussions and prioritization of potential solutions.

  • Ensure services are thoughtful, scalable, and aligned with the vision of a unified Veteran digital experience.

  • To enable Platform team members to have an easy way to document all the elements (tools, best practices, resources, ways of working, etc) of their service so that it has the best chance of success.

  • To provide clearer insights to leadership on Platform teams’ progress as they plan, improve, and document their services.

Process

There were 3 core elements to our process:

1. Establishing, publishing, and socializing foundational best practices in service design

To help Platform teams embed Service Design thinking into the soul of their product or service, we first had to create a knowledge base. In Confluence, we set up our library of resources: templates, examples, and custom guidelines for Platform services. This knowledge base was readily available to every team. We promoted new content or recent collaborations by announcing them in Slack across relevant channels, highlighting improvements or updates as they became available, and presenting updates during Platform-wide sprint demos.

2. Listening, asking questions, and building relationships

Much of our work involved speaking with teams to gain a deeper understanding of their structure, working methods, existing capabilities and processes, challenges, dependencies, and any other factors critical to their contributions to tools and services on VA.gov. Our goal was to foster a collaborative, open-door policy where teams could rely on our support and engage in participatory design as applicable. We wanted to make it clear that this was a friendly how-to-adopt-best-practices setting vs. one that dictated they must adopt best practices.

3. Providing support, recommendations, and/or metrics for individual team needs

Sometimes, a general approach wasn’t enough for teams with unique challenges or a specific success metric to track that required more hands-on involvement from the Service Design team. Gaining a clear understanding of their perspectives and goals enabled us to identify opportunities for collaboration, measurement, and improvement. For these initiatives, we conducted workshops, created service blueprints and user journeys, carried out moderated and unmoderated qualitative and quantitative research with their target audience, and reported our findings and recommendations.

As UX lead, I was responsible for:

  • Leading service blueprinting and journey mapping efforts across teams

  • Conducting qualitative and quantitative research to inform platform strategies

  • Authoring structured guidance to support scalable adoption of service design practices

  • Implementing sustainable systems for sharing best practices and team collaboration

  • Building trusted relationships across technical and non-technical Platform teams

  • Guiding cross-functional groups through co-creation and discovery activities

  • Translating research and insights into clear recommendations for leadership and partners

  • Addressing complex challenges across the VA.gov Platform ecosystem

Result

During my two years on the Service Design team, we enjoyed positive and engaging partnerships with the Platform teams we worked with.

I contributed to or led the following initiatives:

  • Led the creation of the Service Design Team's Customer Journey Maps and Service Blueprints guide. 

  • Led the Platform Governance Design Intent study to evaluate teams’ experiences and identify areas of improvement. 

  • Contributed to research synthesis and authored content for the VA Forms Digitization Guide to provide best practices for those involved in modernizing the forms experience.

  • Built a guide for implementing Slack workflows that allowed Platform team members to provide feedback anytime

  • Researched and demoed a new journey-mapping tool to vet for a potential pilot project