Cait the Encourageable on Nostr: Just spent two hours in a meeting. Providing feedback on the Ontario government ...
Just spent two hours in a meeting. Providing feedback on the Ontario government health info website, https://Health811.ontario.ca
We were specifically working on the Medical Library portion of the website, if you're following along at home. The UX in particular.
But the first problem I noted was that this medical library was a) not a true computer search, but a stupid card catalogue in digital form; and 2) didn't contain the word "transgender". In any context.
I made some pithy points about how this clearly reflects our government's cavalier attitude toward trans health care in general. Someone made a noise about how being trans isn't a sickness, which I appreciated on a whole different level than the intent, which was to erase us. I said yes, you're right, but it's still health care, and needs to have information provided to Ontarians who need it.
And the card catalogue...OMG. Their search has no capacity for dealing with common spelling errors, no capacity for synonyms, no keyword search (only title search, with exact match).
And at one point, they said they had to use four options to direct their Chat users, because they had four departments to offer. I asked why they needed to make their corporate structure our problem? You can make multiple options point to one department. We don't need to know how many departments there are.
Argh. Just a frustrating experience, and you wonder whether they had any ordinary humans test the site before deployment, or just the UX designers themselves.
OH, but I did get well paid for attending.
OH ALSO, the website does have a huge list of links to medical journal articles about transgender health care. These are not available from the Medical Library. You have to search the keyword on the main site search to get the list of articles.
We were specifically working on the Medical Library portion of the website, if you're following along at home. The UX in particular.
But the first problem I noted was that this medical library was a) not a true computer search, but a stupid card catalogue in digital form; and 2) didn't contain the word "transgender". In any context.
I made some pithy points about how this clearly reflects our government's cavalier attitude toward trans health care in general. Someone made a noise about how being trans isn't a sickness, which I appreciated on a whole different level than the intent, which was to erase us. I said yes, you're right, but it's still health care, and needs to have information provided to Ontarians who need it.
And the card catalogue...OMG. Their search has no capacity for dealing with common spelling errors, no capacity for synonyms, no keyword search (only title search, with exact match).
And at one point, they said they had to use four options to direct their Chat users, because they had four departments to offer. I asked why they needed to make their corporate structure our problem? You can make multiple options point to one department. We don't need to know how many departments there are.
Argh. Just a frustrating experience, and you wonder whether they had any ordinary humans test the site before deployment, or just the UX designers themselves.
OH, but I did get well paid for attending.
OH ALSO, the website does have a huge list of links to medical journal articles about transgender health care. These are not available from the Medical Library. You have to search the keyword on the main site search to get the list of articles.