A couple of articles this week on the redesign of the Obamacare web site: among the major changes, reducing the number of screens and permitting the use of the "back" button.
Those are familiar problems--the Treasury Direct website, which has been around for this century, still doesn't permit the use of the "back" button nor is it particularly user friendly in its design.
Going back to last century, when the original software for taking acreage reports was designed for the System/36, because no one had the experience, there was one screen for entering the crop, one screen for the practice, one screen for the intended usage, one for crop share, etc.--if I remember a total of 7 screens to report one field (i.e. common land unit as it's known now). Naturally there was mass rebellion in the field, people couldn't use the software, and there was mass evasion of the issue in Washington and Kansas City. We all knew we'd done the best we knew, and our childhood fairy tales assured us that anything done with good intentions would turn out well.
I'm not sure I ever fully learned the lessons that episode might have taught. I did oversee a redesign of the software in later years, but I was too much a coward really to research whether it was as usable as it should have been--after all computerization should make life better, not worse, shouldn't it?
I think of these things when I read about doctors upset with their digitized medical records systems.
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