Usability 17th October
Today we had a good look at the NHS Direct site in usability terms and I was quite surprised just how many issues we raised with it. I'd thought it would be comprehensively well designed as the NHS is a vast organisation and they can afford get the top people in. The home page should be contained within one screen without the need to scroll down as the user is presented with a confusingly large amount of text to sift through and most of the stuff you'd need to scroll to see just won't get seen. I would move the NHS logo, also serving as a Home button to the top left handside where you'd expect to find it. Some of the pictures used aren't directly relevant to what they are supposed to represent and I would lose them and have a lot more options in icon based lists. There are pictures on the top left hand side that are broken into squares so they almost look like options but they aren't and don't really serve any purpose so they shouldn't be there. There is only one part of the screen flashing which is a looping series of the word welcome in various languages. It is not clear that this is where you need to click in order to change the language and it would be very easy to miss your own language on it anyway. We all decided that you should be able to decide between the NHS sites for Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland right at the start rather then having the links to these sites in various places on the English site. It was an interesting lecture that reminded me how applying simple logic at every stage of the design process can create really usable products.
posted by nick_gerrard @ 4:19 AM
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