So You Want to be Human-Centered … But What Does That Mean in Practice?
You've probably heard the terms human-centered design (HCD), user experience (UX) design, design thinking, or maybe even service design thrown around. When people think about design, they think bright colors, fun fonts, and splashy visuals. And sure, accessible fonts and colors and pleasant visual interfaces are components of good design. But UX is a much deeper technical discipline that spans psychology, sociology, behavioral science, linguistics, computer science, and, yes, visual design.
Recently, a few colleagues and I spoke on a panel at VETS26 about benefits modernization at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The session was born from our experience launching four VA benefits application forms 7-8 times faster than traditional VA timelines. One of the threads that kept coming up in our discussion is how to keep a human-centered philosophy in practice inside a complex federal environment like VA.
UX comes back to one core idea: keeping the end user's needs in mind at all times. The reason this matters is simple: When we apply our own assumptions and experiences to solving others' problems, we often miss what the person we’re designing for actually needs. UX gives us a structured way to avoid that. It's a research process, a design philosophy, and a strategy for making experiences intuitive and delivering impactful outcomes, by and for real people.
Within the VA context, our end users can be anyone from Veterans to caretakers to Veteran Service Representatives (VSRs) guiding people through the VA system. When we say we're user-centered in our work, what we mean is we are always keeping those folks and their needs at the heart of what we do, from start to finish and beyond. When working with marginalized populations — like Veterans with disabilities — it’s especially important to keep human-centered design principles at heart. There are a number of ways to ensure that you’re designing and researching in a way that is equitable, accessible, and trauma-informed. Let’s take a brief look at them in practice.
Accessibility
Government services need to work for everyone, and that means building with accessibility as a design philosophy from the very beginning, not tacked on as a compliance checkbox at the end. An estimated 40% of Veterans have a disability, meaning Veterans using assistive technology are a huge portion of VA’s user base. It is important to design with their accessibility needs in mind first and foremost; the rest follows. Incorporating accessibility in the design phase means our solutions are not only legally compliant but also pleasant and usable experiences for everyone.
Content Design and Strategy
Government services can sometimes feel dense and technical. Content design is about more than just the words on the screen; clear, plain-language content helps users navigate complicated forms and processes. Good content design is built on research with real users and includes everything from instructional text to error messages and alerts to consistency, voice, tone, and grammar. When done right, good content significantly reduces friction for both the user and the federal agency.
In our VA benefits digitization work, we found a lot of confusion in our research around specific questions. Updating the wording of the questions to include more plain language and helper text proved to be a much more effective way to guide Veterans and caretakers through the form than a complex technical solution. Sometimes the simplest answer is the most effective.
UX/UI Interface Design
This is what most people think of when it comes to UX: visual and interactive screens of a product. UX/UI design helps people understand how to use a product to get things done. In government contexts, where services can be dense and unfamiliar, good interface design is what makes a complicated process feel manageable.
VA has a robust design system (the VA Design System, or VADS) with extensive patterns and components, all of which are built off extensive research with Veterans and other end users. Understanding and integrating with VADS and using it effectively ensures that Veterans interacting with VA.gov experience a seamless, easy interface.
UX Research
UX research is how we surface and translate user experiences into actionable insights to guide product decisions. At a high level, this means we’re trying to understand our users’ needs and pain points.
No matter how perfect you think your design is, when you get to usability testing with real people, they are going to find issues, bugs, and things you never expected. That’s a normal part of the design process; in fact, it’s the whole point!
For benefits modernization, we interviewed 16 Veterans and caretakers and asked them to walk through our digital form so we could see where the designs failed in real time, and then quickly update based on their feedback.
Often, UX research combines qualitative research (like interviews with Veterans) with quantitative research (like website use metrics). When conducting qualitative research, it’s important to be trauma-informed and equitable. Our users have often had difficult experiences relating to the government services they’re accessing. We aim to be thoughtful about this and create a safe space to give them control over what and how they share. Equitable research means we actively work to include diverse voices (not just the easiest people to recruit), so our solutions actually work for everyone who needs them, not just the people it was easiest to talk to.
Service Design
Service design connects the dots at a higher level. Government services often span multiple touchpoints, systems, and organizations. We think about the real-world experiences around the tools we’re building. Our users move through a journey that expands well beyond the specific products we’re building. We map the entire experience to identify opportunities to reduce friction and improve outcomes.
Looking ahead, we're exploring opportunities to leverage agentic AI to help Veterans complete benefits applications. For example, some benefits applications might require specific medical documentation from specific medical professionals. A submission with the wrong documentation results in delays, back-and-forth, and frustration for Veterans. Agentic AI tooling could help people better understand how to submit comprehensive application packages, or even use automated rules engines to estimate the strength of the application. That means fewer processing delays, less confusion, and benefits reaching the people who deserve them faster. We identified these pain points using a service design lens, mapping the whole Veteran experience — not just the moments they spent on our digital forms.
That's what being human-centered looks like in practice.
To learn more about Aquia's work supporting VA forms modernization, contact us at federal@aquia.us.
