One-click compensation
Paving the road to travel reimbursement
Role
Staff Designer
Focus
UX and Visual Design
Challenge
Often times, Veterans are required to travel up to 150 miles to their closest VA Medical Center. They have a right to seek financial reimbursement for their travel to the facility. Up until the launch of the app, they only had a few options to file the claim: a paper form, or a third-party website.
The third party website was inaccessible to assistive tech users, so our team opted to explore submission through the mobile app. We also wanted to alleviate manual processing, and lessen the feedback loops between the Veteran and their facility.
Role
I collaborated with the app's data analyst and the website team. My aim was to align with the web experience, while optimizing the use within the native mobile context.
We analyzed existing web metrics like task conversion and bounce rate to gather ideas for where to improve. With that data, I distilled the form to only three questions and reordered the questions to limit user frustration.
highlights
Distilled a complex paper form to only 3 questions
20,964 successful claims submitted in the first 27 hours launched
Mobile app instance serves 3x more users than the website
“I don't think it's possible to overstate how big a deal this feature is for Veterans. I'm proud of this whole team for helping enable this next step in streamlining veterans benefit delivery.”
– chief technology officer (CTO) at va; 2025
11K
Users served each day
Design process
To offer a sense of control to the user, and gain data for where to go next, I provided ways to dismiss or validate actions. Veterans have to option to either dismiss the Alert, or report instances where the claim reimbursement task didn't show up.
This was critical in discovering gaps, while also gaining support to resolve issues within upstream services.
Overall outcomes
As a staff designer, I also helped improve other products within the omni-channel experience.
I worked with the web teams to recommend changes within their instances. When presented with the data, they changed their questions to yield better user satisfaction. We also shared accessibility issues with the external team for their consideration.
Results
I fostered an open and iterative culture within my team, as well as external partners. I right-sized an often complicated task by listening to research and distilling the most important tasks into a mobile experience. This project taught me the importance of designing for context, while also allowing me to deliver a high-value feature requested by Veterans. Listening to customers is always the best path to success.
