Medical User Interface

I was recently at the doctor and saw the user interface they use. It made me throw up in my mouth a little. Redacted screenshot below.

Apologies for cropping the left hand side of the screen. It’s just more of the same. This is a perfect example of an application with no information architecture. It’s just an explosion of data and buttons all over the place.

The doctor said, “I hate this. I can’t find anything.” But she also said, “This is new, you should have seen the old one!” Watching her use it, she kept clicking until she found the thing she needed. It was painful to watch.

Someone designed and built this. In my professional opinion, this is typical and terrible all at the same time. It’s design malpractice. Why does this keep happening? Why do we keep making this horrible Frankenstein mess of an interface? I feel like I am taking crazy pills. How can so many people in tech accept this as a shippable user interface?

Interfaces like this greatly upset me. I can only rant about tabs inside tabs and mixed metaphors and progressive disclosure for so long. It sucks. I could fix it, but I already know the problem of how the institution that built it would reject the better system and opt for the status quo.

The only good news is that in ten years, all of this will be replaced with AI doctors. Assuming they don’t kill us.