Day in the life: Allyce Moncton, Designer
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7:45 am
My alarm goes off. I get ready, eat breakfast, and prepare for the day.
8:50 am
I hop on the bus. It’s a quick ride to the VA office downtown. Towards the end of the trip, I pop into Slack to see what my east coast colleagues are chatting about before I get to the office. Our team of USDS’ers, VA partners, and the contractors we work with are distributed across all time zones. Slack is the best way for us to connect.
9:15 am
I arrive at the office and catch up with our Caseflow Design Lead. Caseflow is a tool that helps judges, attorneys, and employees at the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA) review and track Veterans’ appeals for benefits. Our Design Lead and I quickly connect about new learnings from a usability testing session yesterday.
We wrap up our conversation, and I grab an available desk and open my laptop.
10:00 am
My team and I are rolling Caseflow out to a new group of people at BVA. Yesterday, my colleague Marvo and I conducted a usability testing session with an employee who is part of this new group. I start to document what we learned before we start development next week. Our team of designers, engineers, and a product manager work in two week sprints. For designers, this often means that we have two weeks to design something, prototype it, and test our designs with users, depending on the complexity of the challenge.
Since I joined USDS in June, I’ve been focused on designing Caseflow features that support how appeals are reviewed under the Appeals Modernization Act. The law went into effect on February 19, 2019, and we celebrated our work as a team. Despite meeting this milestone, the work on Caseflow doesn’t stop. We still have a lot that we are curious about and want to enhance.
12:00 pm
It’s lunch time. I walk over to a conference room where we’re having a monthly gathering with everyone in the Digital Service at VA. We eat tacos, play a storytelling/guessing game that a colleague played in the Peace Corps, and have some good laughs. A few people even came over from USDS Headquarters to join in on the fun.
1:00 pm
It’s time to switch gears. I’m often working on a few different parts of Caseflow at once. I make some tweaks to interface designs that we’ll test with attorneys at BVA next week.
2:00 pm
I head to a weekly sync with our Caseflow Design Lead. We frequently tag team work, and we set aside an hour to talk about what we want to work on during our next sprint and give each other feedback on our work in progress.
3:00 pm
It’s time for our weekly design team meeting, and all of the Caseflow designers gather in one room. We have a new agenda item every week. Today, we talk about the best way to gather metrics on Caseflow’s usability.
5:30 pm
I leave the office and head towards my apartment to catch up with some friends. When my partner and I moved to D.C., we didn’t know anyone in the area, but that quickly changed. Many USDS’ers move for the job and are in the same situation. Everyone at USDS is welcoming, and a lot of us do social activities outside of work. If you choose to join us and have to relocate, there are several USDS’ers (and alumni) who are interested in different things and will show you the ropes.
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