Designing online forms that improve services for veterans

Millions of veterans, their families, and caregivers rely on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for essential benefits and services. VA’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) makes sure that the agency's benefits and services are accessible online.

From March 2022 to January 2025, content experts at Bloom Works worked with VA OCTO to scale its content practice. We worked with more than 80 partners and across different business lines in VA. Our goal was to create accurate, consistent, and accessible content on VA.gov to help build more trust.

During our partnership, we improved 44 online forms on VA.gov. Our holistic approach to content inspired our frequent collaborators to hire more content specialists on their own product teams. And this allowed VA to design and deliver better services.

Part of our work included improving the online forms and tools that help veterans and their loved ones get the benefits they’re entitled to. During our partnership, we worked on 44 online forms, all with unique challenges. Many of the forms had confusing language and dense instructions. 

Moving the paper forms online alone wouldn’t meet the needs of veterans. We needed to change the forms to make them easier to use and understand. We brought content design best practices to this work, but we viewed our mandate as broader than just content. We focused on improving the overall experience, making everything more consistent, and integrating best practices around trauma-informed designs.

From our perspective, content design was more than just the words on the screen. While our mandate was content, we viewed our role more holistically. 

We led conversations around these types of questions: 

• How are veterans finding and using this benefit?
• How does this benefit fit into the larger delivery of VA benefits?
• What specific business goals does this service support?
• What needs and pain points have veterans shared about accessing this benefit?
• How can we make accessing this benefit easier for veterans?

 Asking these questions helped shape better experiences, but it sometimes required us to reimagine solutions with product teams and partners.

Luckily, we all shared the common goal of delivering better services for veterans. The fact we asked the questions set shared goals for collaboration and built trust with product teams.

As content strategists, our goal was to help veterans, their family members, and caregivers have a cohesive and familiar experience when they fill out forms and access information and services across VA’s ecosystem.

We worked with teams across the VA.gov ecosystem to ensure all content was consistent with VA’s design system and content style guide by taking these steps:

• We ensured consistency between the content on the online form, the paper form, and the related web pages on VA.gov.
• We fact-checked information from multiple sources and aligned with partners to create a single source of truth for product teams.
• We designed and documented patterns for error messages and other form fields across VA.gov. This helped simplify and scale future product work.
• We documented all our content decisions to help build a mature content practice across VA.

These efforts were critical for upholding consistent content standards across the many people who write and design content on VA.gov, and for building better services that veterans can trust.

30% of veterans reported having a disability connected to their military service in 2023. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is also more common among veterans. And navigating benefits and filling out a form can be stressful for anyone. 

We prioritized accessibility and taking a trauma-informed approach by taking these steps:

• We collaborated with accessibility experts and used user research to design form headers that were more scannable for veterans using assistive technology. This made online forms easier to read for all veterans.
• We collaborated with information architects to change the order of a question in an online form flow so we didn’t ask for sensitive information first. This helped us group potentially triggering content with a warning to avoid traumatizing veterans.
• We labeled and explained which questions in an online form were optional. This reduced cognitive load and gave veterans the agency to skip optional questions that were potentially sensitive.

PACT Act is one of the largest health care and benefit expansions in VA history. After it became a law in 2022, it extended eligibility for VA health care for veterans with toxic exposures and veterans of the Vietnam War, Gulf War, and post-9/11 eras. 

That expansion created new requirements. We needed to add questions about toxic exposure to the online VA health care application. We worked with the health applications team to make this form clearer, more accessible, and easier to understand.

How we improved this form and overall experience for veterans: 

• We changed content to align with VA’s content style guide. This included using:

  • an empathetic and conversational tone
  • appropriate header levels
  • shorter sentences to reduce cognitive load 

• We updated content on related pages on VA.gov. These ensured a consistent experience for veterans.

• We added content-specific questions to the user research process. This helped us identify areas of the form we could improve in the future based on research findings. It also made sure the form addressed user feedback and needs.

Veterans and their family members can appoint a VA accredited representative to help them file claims and request decision reviews. 78% of claims are filed with the help of an accredited representative. Accredited representatives are an essential part of the benefits system. However, research showed that many veterans weren’t sure how to find one. 

To address this gap, we collaborated with a multidisciplinary team to design a cohesive accredited representative experience on VA.gov. This included everything from digitizing related forms to designing tools that make it easier to find an accredited representative.

How we improved related forms and the overall experience for veterans: 

• We tested new content and design patterns with veterans and used the results to inform our recommendations. 
• We created a single source of truth with guidance for writing about accredited representatives on VA.gov. This helped create a consistent and familiar experience for veterans who were seeking information about how to get help.
• We created a product playbook to guide future collaboration with the accredited representative team. This saved time for answering service design and delivery questions during product development.

During our partnership, we improved 44 online forms on VA.gov. Our holistic approach to content inspired our frequent collaborators to hire more content specialists on their own product teams. And this allowed VA to design and deliver better services. 

In 2024, VA delivered $187 billion in benefits to more than 6 million veterans, their family members, and caregivers. These were record high numbers. 

The same year, veteran trust in VA reached an all-time record of 80.4%—an increase of 25% since 2016. And veteran trust in VA health care reached 92%. This was another record high number.

We helped implement a mature and sustainable content practice across VA. And in the process, we helped build more trust in VA’s digital services.