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Maybe it’s as bad as they say?

Published by marco on

Purely out of morbid curiosity, I visited Healthcare.gov to see what’s going on over there. I’d heard so much.

Here are some comments additional to those embedded in the screenshot:

 Home page is decent, if a little careless

  • It did not reject me because I’m browsing from a foreign country. +1
  • It redirected me from www.healthcare.gov to healthcare.gov. Canonical name is the short one. +1
  • It loaded quickly. +1
  • It’s pretty light on graphics. +1
  • There are way too many fonts and font sizes. –1
  • Stop using small-caps for anything other than titles, especially at small font sizes –1
  • What’s up with all the bold text? Did you not get the memo from Android, Windows 8 Phone and iOS 7? –1
  • Elements in lower half of the page are placed kind of haphazardly and text is not aligned on a grid. –1
  • Still, it’s working. +1

Shutting off stylesheets yields relatively semantic content. There are a few too many icons that could have been moved to the stylesheet instead.

 Lotsa icons hidden in this page

Having all of those repeated sets of icons in the page reduces usability for the disabled, who are actually quite likely to be browsing a government insurance site, actually. Still, it’s better than a lot of other pages in this regard.

Let us soldier on and see what kind of plans there are.

 Find an insurance plan

Well, that was pretty straightforward and easy and not at all slow and broken. Thumbs up for the federal government, amirite?

Deep breath. Let’s go see what New York State has to offer. Apparently, it has its own site to handle ACA applications. I’d heard about that. It’s a rich state and state-level trumps federal-level every time, right? This is gonna be good.

 New York State page: Access Denied. Crash. Boom.

And so my journey comes to an abrupt end, my interest wanes and my basic faith in the utter awfulness of all software is restored.