I'm helping an elderly person with a patient portal, and wow, there are about 4 different problems ranging from unclear instructions to pages that don't work well when the phone is zoomed in enough for an older person to actually read the text.

Plus, the iPhone keeps popping up unhelpful gunk.

This person isn't particularly afraid of technology either, but they literally can't do it.

I now think every web developer should be forced to walk through their processes with an 85-year-old.

@grammargirl We are supposed to... part of any website build, other than the steps prior to building it, include usability and accessability reviews... websites that fail these two important reviews usually get sued by the ADA lawyers who are looking to make a quick buck suing and settling with website owners when their sites fail the most basic navigation and accessability requirements. If the site you are speaking about is poorly built or fails the ADA accessibility, report them... usually the weight of litigation tends to light a fire under the website owners to fix the issues post haste. Weird pop ups or unclear direction are all part of that accessability and usability aspect of a good, easy to use website.

@grammargirl Similar experience: 70+ yo person having to deal with expired X.509 certificates (.gov.hu app) - what are these devs smoking??

@grammargirl

I think the problems with those portals go far beyond an 85 yr old's perception.

Everytime I go to another doctor they enroll me in a different web portal. Without exception, the actual doctor's in those offices have all expressed to me how much their portal sucks. And they do. Big Time. I'm in three of them now.

My doctors encourage me not to use the portals for anything other than looking up test results. And some of the portals suck for doing that too.

One of the 3 I'm in got hacked and my info is now in the hands of whoever. Medical offices are not good with network security policy.

So why do they have them? Insurance companies force them to, and the cost of obtaining and maintaining said useless portals is passed along to patients.

@grammargirl It's fairly simple:

If you're sending someone a PDF (or similar) via a text or an "app" then FFS also send an email so that the poor punter can read it on a real screen.

@grammargirl I feel this so much. I’ve helped family members with various medical sites and trying to get some things done has been possible only because I have a lot of technical skills and worked something out that should have been obvious. It absurd how broken some of these are. Or just obnoxious in other ways. One hospital system makes me sign unchanged paperwork for nearly every appointment no matter how recent the last was. Another one - that uses the same underlying platform! - has been configured to only ask once a year.

I worked somewhere previously that did a lot of software development for payment services. I noticed that a lot of the issue with bad user experience in the software for internal staff (e.g. sales, support folks, etc) came of the developers having no concrete experience of USING the processes they were writing the software to do. I wonder how much that comes into play with healthcare platforms. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s A Lot.

@grammargirl
Haha don’t get me started with that 💩😂

@grammargirl One of my earlier tech experiences was supporting a man who lived in assisted living learn how to navigate a computer to get online to send email. He had never used a computer, and his vision was not great.

He wanted to be able to email more with his grandkids, get pictures, etc -- this is back in the mid-late 90s.

That experience really stuck with me over the years.

@grammargirl yeah @slightlyoff has been ranting about this forever

@grammargirl the team I'm on has put accessibility as our number one priority for years now. We think it's the right thing to do, in general, but especially because we maintain a public university website!

It is so surprising to me when I meet other web developers and I mention that such-and-such new trend/feature wouldn't be accessible and they say "so?"

Or when I mention spending time with our technical writers to make the copy on our forms easy to understand and they say "why?"

Clear instructions don't only benefit 80 year olds, or people with limited comprehension, it just saves your brain a few processor cycles.

Given how much of our lives are managed by web apps, I think everyone's lives would be happier if companies and project managers were mindful of basic user experience issues when scoping out the budget for these things.

@grammargirl

i have said for quite a while that no developer should be allowed to write a single line of code until they've done 6 months of desktop support at an extended care facility.

i now have to do all technical "things" for my mother, since the web sites and apps she's forced to use are mostly unusable for her.

@TimWardCam I agree with that but would also point tout that you assume that the poor punter has email. My 87 year old Dad has no idea how computers work. He retired as a painter and decorator 10 years ago and his wife always used to do the computer-y stuff before she passed away. Now he is excluded from various low-cost energy tariffs because they are only available online and don’t get me started on trying to park in town without a mobile phone to pay for it. It is just cr*p the way that those without the ability to work computers are just thrown on the scrap heap.
Not digging at you, honest, just pointing out that there are so many assumptions made by others that everyone worth dealing with (i.e. monetisable) is online. Sorry for the rant.

@cyberhoover Yes, there have to be non-computer alternatives. When I was a councillor this was a basic principle of how to provide public services (I'm not sure it still is).

There's a car park in #Cambridge which when I last heard had almost no usage because nobody could make the online payment system work.

I personally have (despite trying for some time) *never* succeeded in making *any* pay-by-phone system work. And I'm a professional techie.