Background
Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) honours the contributions and sacrifices made by Veterans and expresses Canada’s gratitude to them. VAC offers benefits for current and former Canadian Forces members and their families, which include financial assistance, health, disability and death benefits. As of 2018, 18% of Canadian Veterans are receiving them1.
The vast Veteran benefit landscape has become difficult to understand over the years. The sheer number of them causes some Veterans to be overwhelmed when trying to find the ones that would help them. Different information sources cite a different number of available benefits and the information regarding how they are associated is unclear. Benefit descriptions are written using complicated, policy-centred language, and frontline VAC staff work hard to communicate the real meaning to Veterans.
There is a clear need to better connect Veterans and their families with the benefits that VAC offers. This need, coupled with VAC’s promise to modernize service delivery, propelled the Canadian Digital Service and VAC to build a benefits finder where Veterans can discover relevant benefits and confidently take their next steps, whatever they may be.
Blog posts
The team sometimes writes blog posts about our work:
- Discovery Phase: Understanding the problem by Daniel Tse, Product Manager
- Teaming up to deliver better outcomes for Veterans by Ross Ferguson, Product Lead
- Building a research plan with five simple questions by Mithula Naik, Senior Design Researcher
- Moving content from code to cloud by Steve Astels and Stephen McMurtry, Developers
- How meeting face to face builds team trust by Allison Rothmel, Consultant at Veterans Affairs Canada
- The sweet spot: when policy empowers design research by Stevie-Ray Talbot, Policy
- How we measure our delivery and why it’s useful by Stevie-Ray Talbot, Policy, and Courtney Claessens, Product Manager
Presentations
The product and work was presented at the Code for Canada Showcase in August, 2018. Watch the video.
Footnotes: