Public design that sucks

In Denmark there is growing criticism that the authorities spend 37M DKK a year (approx 5M USD) on it’s public health-portal, Sundhed.dk, without that many people actually using what it has to offer.

I completely understand where the sceptics are coming from. When a portal, with the stated purpose of being the one stop solution for health information and services in a country of 5 million people, has less than 20.000 users a day - logged as well as non-logged - you have to wonder, if you could do better, I think.

And there’s amble room for improvement. Because it’s public design at it’s worst.

First of all, the design itself is visually unappealing. There is nothing there that makes me as a user want to engage in the content and actually try to get any help or information for any health related matter. In fact the design screams “get lost” right in your face. But that is a minor thing.

A more serious thing is that the way the information is structured, and the way the communication tries to relate to you, is seriously flawed. My guess is that health care professionals did this with other health professionals in mind and using come programmers, who couldn’t care less. The disregard for ordinary people and their ability to find what they are looking for is blatant. If this had been a school project with an end user focus, it would have flunked. Big time.

But the biggest issue is the digital signature part. It’s one of the most flawed projects ever from the Danish government. It’s more luck than skill if it works, when you need it, and it’s just so cumbersome that I can’t begin to imagine how less IT literate people than me feel when they try it out. If I was the designer of that system, I would be embarrased.

All in all there’s a lot of good reasons why Sundhed.dk sucks and deserves a good spanking as a necessary proces towards getting their act together. That the chairman of the company behind it, Bent Hansen, thinks that a cost of 1,25 DKK/PV (0,22 USD/PV) is actually good just speaks volumes about how bad and, in my humble opinion, mismanaged this whole project is.

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