[gforge]

Yes, there have been numerous people pointing out this in this thread. I think that UX design is viewed as frosting on the cake instead of the thing that actually makes it work. Unfortunately I think one of the issues is that the SDLC is broken.

For some reason we keep getting features that few of us actually requested but that often make sense in that they are life saving, that is if people actually used them. I have a ton of indicators flashing all-over the place and after a while your brain simply adapts and ignores them. I doubt that anyone has actually done any analysis to see if these tools actually save lives.

I've been involved in some projects when I've spent 30 minutes with UX people and then never heard back from them. When the final product arrives it is full of annoying flaws, e.g. the latest software I was involved in the work flow is: 1. click on "open software" from the patient chart 2. a new window opens where I manually have to click on "log in" (note, I'm not adding a password) 3. the UI goes into authentication 4. the UI goes back to the login screen 5. the UI asks me a question that I _always_ answer the same thing to 6. I actually get to the data I was interested in

The most annoying part is number 4 - if I accidentally click on "log in" everything breaks and I have to close the window and redo everything from start.

Most of these UX issues fall under the category - murder by a thousand cuts. It is mentally tiring to be faced with all these issues but none of them is like open heart surgery where one mistake can be fatal. What happens is that doctors/nurses become tired and don't put the effort into the patient interaction where the actual value in healthcare is created. I'm pretty sure that bad UX in the end kills many more patients through this than malfunctioning critical hardware.

I truly wish that people in this forum that create health-care software think of UX and actually use their software more than just "I clicked through and everything works". Your bosses will probably never ask for UX features because they have a deadline, but you are in charge of designing and during that process it is easy to fix many of these annoyances (e.g. just disable the log in button).