Convenience and privacy have finally met up in the medical world. After visiting my doctor for a lower back freeze up, and having x-rays, he quickly registered me to a medical extranet website where I could read his evaluation of my x-rays without another trip to his office or waiting around. It was fast and convenient. Just the way we like our burgers. But quickly after getting the doctor’s email informing me to visit this site for his evaluation, and logging on, there was one big problem. I almost deleted my results. Why? Because the user interface was archaic, as in 1999 or earlier. The “delete” button was just pixels under “Click Here.” Why am I even provided such a quick option to delete?
Check it out. Look where the delete button is, and where the accept button is. Bad, bad, bad.
I hate to think how much money went into this doctor patient system, front-end, back-end, platform development, consulting etc. No one was really focused on the user experience. I would imagine a simple paper prototype of this page would alert the designers and interaction design folks (I don’t think there were any, really.)that it was broke. Good idea. Bad execution.