Design principles

VACDS design principles are fundamental guidelines intended to empower app teams to design, update, and implement consistent, useful apps for the VA clinical setting. Guided by the Clinical Design Principles, we have broken them down into actionable steps.

---

Clinical Design Principles

The guidance for design principles were created in collaboration with stakeholders and experts across VHA and OCTO informed by the VHA organizational/tech/regulatory environment. They promote human-centered design and delivery best practices. Each principle includes relevant frameworks, theories, and examples where relevant.

How will the Clinical Design Principles be used and maintained?

Clinical Design Principles:

• Are used and referenced regularly in design cadences and decision making ceremonies

• Inform design reviews

• Advance boundaries towards the vision of a more cohesive care solution and service

• Prevent misaligned design

• Are a living, evolving resource, and are revisited periodically to be evaluated for relevance, completeness, and impact

Clinical Design Principles

1. Complement & supplement EHR functionality, don’t replace it

2. Maximize clarity; minimize noise

3. Provide guidance & instill confidence with non-obtrusive feedback loops

4. Facilitate insights & health outcomes over information and metrics

5. Bridge clinical decisions & clinical actions

6. Support clinicians’ sense of control, even when control may be limited

7. Configuration, not customization, that supports clinician workflow preferences & needs

8. Deliver consistency through a total system approach, thinking about process, outcome & experience

Our principles

1. Ease cognitive burden

2. Reduce noise

3. Make it actionable

4. Provide useful context

5. Train the user

6. Empower clinicians

---

Inheriting from other design systems

The VACDS inherits from the USWDS and the VADS, and part of that inheritance is following their design principles, as well as our own.

USWDS design principles

Visit the USWDS design principles section to learn more about:

1. Start with real user needs

2. Earn trust

3. Embrace accessibility

4. Promote continuity

5. Listen

VADS design principles

Visit the VADS design principles page to learn more about:

1. Usable by everyone

2. Simple

3. Veteran first

4. Impact