[jobposter1234]

Why is it garbage? It seems to me that most programmers who care about their craft would make a halfway decent UI by default.

I believe that interfaces end up the way they do for a reason. I'm curious what the reason is for healthcare -- is it a disconnect between stakeholders in the design stage? Lack of budget?

I'm hoping you can help me learn beyond the "design by committee" or other cliches. or at least understand those cliches in a medical setting.

[aswanson]

Its garbage because its written by big companies with slick salesforces like oracle, etc. The design/UX is an afterthought; the main thrust of these companies is suits closing the big deal. The interfaces built by these companies are almost never designed by anyone with taste, done in java, and look like your typical j2ee architecture with circa 2006 web interface sensibilities.

[analog31]

This is the "enterprise software problem," to wit: All enterprise software sucks because it's sold to administrators and not to users.

A friend of mine works for one of the EMR software companies, though he doesn't program any more. I've also experienced the adoption of large scale enterprise packages such as SAP and SharePoint.

As I understand it, the UI design is literally an afterthought, because it doesn't exist at the time of sale. The expectation is that somebody will adapt the software to the customer's processes by creating custom UI's, data base structures, and work flows. There is a mad scramble to throw this stuff together and make it work. I suspect there is simply no time to sit down with workers and respectfully find out how they do their jobs. And processes that worked because the employees didn't follow the procedure, suddenly stop working when coded into software.

[FLUX-YOU]

Some of these solutions have code from 15-20 years ago. After the original authors left the company with deep knowledge, a complete UI redesign went from uphill battle to sheer cliff climb. Once every generation comes and goes, rewrites just get more complex. Even then, the code then was probably based on standards from that long ago, and its quality will most definitely slow you down. Now couple that with the problem of high turn over, and no one wants to handle the shit pile. We keep shoveling things over to get paid.

Considering the staggering size some of these projects are (peripheral evidence of complexity like table counts as mentioned here, and more solid evidence like raw lines of code, number of UI controls from big to small), it quickly becomes economically infeasible to put a modern shine on things when you have features you could be building to make more sales.

A decent UI in 2000 looked much different from now anyway. Also, the programmers probably aren't in charge of looks/design.

[shaftoe]

"who care about their craft"