Welcome to Janus, the retirement services application that helps you adjudicate retirement claims. A more modern, usable, and accessible approach to retirement claims adjudication now exists with Janus. So let's get started and dive into Janus. This topic covers—
- What is Janus,
- The organization, navigation and interaction models for Janus,
- The options you have with the main navigation, the secondary navigation and utility navigation.
After you sign on, Janus shows you the Home page. Once you choose a case to work on, Janus opens.
Let’s talk about what the parts of Janus are at the top. In the dark bar, you have the--what we call "the header." This provides the top or the head of the application itself and on the right, you have the ability to access the secondary navigation functionality. You can—
- Open a case
- Access online help through Hints
- Take a look at your profile. In this example, we're signed in as Pat Brown.
- And log out.
Just under the header on the left you can view the claim's number, the social security number of the annuitant, and the status of the case.
On the right the Utility Navigation lets you look at—
- Alerts that let you know messages, warnings, and errors in the case
- Any history of this particular case
- Documents, forms, and letters you can generate from this case.
- and any comments about this case.
On the left the main navigation shows you sections of the application itself. The main case area is a scrollable region that allows you to go through the case as necessary, either through scrolling, using the scroll bar, or tabbing through items. And even when you tab past the bottom of the visible screen, Janus continues to move forward, displaying the next field.
At the bottom of Janus is the Action Bar. The Action bar provides an area for actions to execute on the case that you’re looking at. We’ll look more into the Action Bar in depth in another lesson.
Let's dive into each of the navigation and interaction areas.
- Health benefits provides the ability to enter the information required from the health benefits plan that the annuitant has requested.
- Life insurance provides election information about the annuitant’s life insurance elections.
- Customer combines the elements that identify who the annuitant is, where they retired from, and identity aspects such as date of birth, social security number, gender and marital status, and so on.
- Below Customer is the Survivor area with all the information about survivors, related to the annuitant.
- Military identifies any pertinent military service.
- Service provides the area for the entire service history of the annuitant.
- Salary provides a place to account for the high three and any other elements that affect salary in the computation of the benefits that the annuitant will receive.
- Contributions allows you to account for any retirement plan contributions the annuitant has made.
- Then below the bar Janus displays the Benefits, Net payment, and Add/deduct, based on calculations that occur.
Let's take a look at how the application itself works when you're using it. Janus organizes its content into sections. A section consists of a heading followed by one or more fields or informational content. In the section heading, you can jump to the next section or the previous section. To do so, select either Previous Section or Next Section.
When you are within a section, Janus highlights the section name in the navigation with a darker font treatment as well as a dark blue bar to the left of that item. When you go to the next section, the highlight moves to that selected section. Also, when your mouse hovers over a navigation item, a momentary blue border appears, indicating what you are selecting when you release the mouse.
If you are using a screen reader, Janus announces where you are navigating.
In the main work area each section header stays fixed at the top of the work area of that section until the next section header replaces it. This feature is especially useful when you have a section that spans the viewable area. As you can see, the sections get replaced. For example, Service now is where Military was, then it is replaced by Salary and so on.
If you're using a mouse, you can scroll the mouse up to the top quickly. Once you get to health benefits, Janus stops at that point.
Navigating the application by tab allows you to quickly go to any particular section as you tab through all the fields. This feature provides assistance not only for sighted people, but for those who have vision problems, jumping to the next section with the keyboard provides an improved accessibility to anything in the application. Reverse tabbing (that is, selecting Shift-Tab) also works, as you would expect it to. These features enable you to choose how you want to navigate through Janus.
Selecting any of the items in the Utility navigation opens the Utility drawer, which highlights those items that appear, based on what you've chosen.
Depending on the case you’re using, you can view alerts, documents, history, and comments. But these items also remain fixed on the right side of your screen, even as you scroll through the application. In a later lesson, we'll look at how each one of these works.
When you're finished with the case, you can then select Open a case and you will go to the Home page for Janus, which we'll look at in detail in another topic.