Portal-wide standardization of access alerts

[jonathanjnelson]

Description

A ticket recently picked up by our team revealed that health tools need a variety of "portal-wide" alerts that have consistent design & architectural placement so that users understand what to expect and get the same messaging when they encounter an error or have an access issue that requires user-action.

However, our current-state documentation of how the health tool teams handle those alerts reveals serious gaps in approach, design, and consistency. We believe that standardizing these alerts across the portal will greatly improve the UX of My HealtheVet on VA.gov, and should be prioritized as an effort related to the sign-in transition work.

The goal of this ticket is to discuss a governance + standardization requirement for these 7 alerts outlined in the body of this ticket (below) for all the "big 4" health tool teams, as well as the My HealtheVet on VA.gov landing page.

User story

As a Veteran, I want access alerts across the health portal to be consistent in design and placement, so that I understand what to expect when I see them and experience consistency + clarity about steps I need to take when I move from one tool to another.

Resources

• Mural to record current-state discovery
• Mural capturing current state of ID-verification handling

Notes

Sara did some work and believes there are 7 alert types that each of the health tools need to: a.) either implement themselves, or route-guard users to the My HealtheVet on VA.gov landing page to see. The alerts include:

1. Alerts that we need to determine how we want to handle architecturally across the portal:

Alert type	Standard established?	Exempt tools (if any)	Notes
ID-verification alerts	Yes	N/A	Published in VADS
No access to My HealtheVet alert	Yes	N/A	Created by Cartography team. Applies when LOA3 users w/o any facilities in their profile try to access any URL in the /my-health domain space
"Register with My HealtheVet" alert	Yes	Appointments	Created by Cartography team. Will be replaced with Account Creation API alerts once launched.
Account Creation API alerts	Not yet	Appointments	Work to develop FE alerts around API failures is still in progress by Cartography team, in collaboration with Identity and MHV Portals + Access teams
Cerner/OH routing alerts	Yes	N/A	Appointments team has most updated version that incorporates latest governance team feedback

We'll need stakeholders across tools teams to decide on the best architectural approach for alert placement. Then, those teams will need to document their current state approach to these alerts (do they handle this at all? If so, what happens when users w/o access to My HealtheVet type in their URLs? etc.).

Routing considerations:

• In general, do we want to block users who do not meet access requirements from getting to health tools (child pages) of My HealtheVet & route-guard them to the MHV Landing Page?
• Would we prefer to let users get to the tools, but prevent them from getting deeper than the main entry points to the tools if they do not have access?
• What about OH/Cerner routing? What pages should those alerts live on within the "big 4" health tools?

2. Alerts that should be handled individually by health tool teams:

Alert type	Standard established?	Exempt tools (if any)	Notes
System error alerts	Unsure	N/A	Need to do discovery to see whether this should be templated / or if individual tool apps can differ
Downtime notification alerts	Unsure	N/A	Need engineer to remind us what this looks like today

Possible tasks:

• Take this idea to office hours & discuss w/ OCTO stakeholders
• Feedback from Kaitlin around making governance requirement
• Ask each tool team to do discovery around these alerts & report back their current state / how they handle each

Acceptance criteria

• Receive feedback from Kaitlin and Robyn on how to move forward with this initiative
• Ticket next steps