A recently released report, done in March 2013, reveals the process of creating Healthcare.gov. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we’ve also worked hard to establish best practices for considering both engineering and the user in software development. These contributions need to be valued, especially for large scale projects. After looking through the slides, one thing I note is that even this improved approach barely mentions the end users of the website. There is one slide that states “Identify consumer paths; review and modify vignettes.” The two examples of this are users who have more or less complex needs when signing up for insurance. I don’t see any mention of involving actual users prior to release.
The NPR write-up states:
Consultants noted there was no clear leader in charge of this project, which we now know contributed to its disastrous release. And there was no “end-to-end testing” of its full implementation, something we now know never happened.
Some of this may fall on us, for not being convincing enough that human factors methods are worth the investment. How much would the public be willing to pay for a solid usability team to work with the website developers?