Problem
Due to new legislation, Caseflow needed to process Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC) Remand cases, which required a new workflow functionality. There was a growing backlog with hundreds of CAVC Remand cases that could not be adjudicated by federal judges and attorneys. As a result, Veterans could not receive the benefits they were entitled to.
Role
Lead designer and researcher
Duration
5 months
Goal
Unblock CAVC Remand cases and increase timely, accurate appeals decisions.
Insights
Final designs
Demo for Create CAVC Remand flow
Final designs UI flow
Results
As of March 2021, 125 cases in the backlog have been brought into Caseflow and all of these appeal types are fully unblocked.
Discovery
For 5-weeks, I paired with my Product Manager to gather requirements from users and key stakeholders to support the creation of this new workflow functionality. Our goals were to better understand the current process with the legacy system and core jobs to be done while locating any pain points.
Process map I created of the legacy CAVC Remands process at the Board of Veterans' Appeals
Design phase
After aligning with stakeholders on problems identified from understanding the legacy CAVC Remands process, I created a UX flowchart to map out how I imagined the functionality to work in Caseflow. I aimed to cover all the bases for the core jobs to be done while addressing pain points such as manual data entry and “on hold” tracking across 2 disconnected systems.
UX flow chart I created to visualize the proposed process in Caseflow
This particular method in mapping out the proposed functionality was very effective in creating alignment with both internal and external stakeholders:
Board of Veterans' Appeals product owners and users: This map was helpful for our client by making sure we were helping them achieve their jobs to be done while remaining compliant with the new legislation.
Product and engineering: Talking through this map with the product development team helped surface the complexity of the user workflows and interconnected data elements. The map helped phase out our epics for agile development and capacity planning for implementation.