A guy who launches websites for a living says Healthcare.gov is, despite popular opinion, not the worst website of all time.

I work at the offices where Healthcare IT News is published. I’m a former associate editor of Healthcare Finance News. We’re a HIMSS-owned company. And I have no idea what to think about Healthcare.gov as a centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act.

In a way, I love that a website is so critical to the success of the program - a sure sign of progress that ostensibly enables what couldn’t be achieved with large-scale health insurance mandates in the past. We’re all on the web now. We all get it. In this regard, we quietly and deftly leapt a major hurdle in the last decade.

And because I’m excited about the website, I’m chagrined by its clumsy launch. My initial feeling was that we blew it; I still worry we have. Maybe we haven’t arrived at the point of delivering web-based technology that enables something as ambitious as the ACA. I felt a foreboding sense of confirmation for my presupposition that our federal government is fundamentally unable to gracefully enact legislation of this enormity in the space of a two-term presidency.

However, I’m also wondering just how bad it really got for end users in the launch phase; I’ve found it impossible to separate the objective usability flaws from the project-oriented facepalming and from the pure political vitriol. When people want to hate something, it had better not let them. I didn’t witness the reported outages and service interruptions firsthand. And I’m sorry, Healthcare.gov detractors, every time I’ve visited the site, it has performed reasonably, if not remarkably, well. I don’t believe this site represents a failure. I don’t believe the ACA is doomed by its marriage to a website that has been, for some users, rather ordinary.

In fact, there’s plenty to like about Healthcare.gov, from a web development and design perspective. The site is built on a responsive theme, optimizing its display across virtually all desktop screen sizes, browsers and mobile devices. It’s attractive enough. Web design as a whole has improved during the Obama Administration, and credit is due to the architects of its core fleet of sites. I, for one, was nerdishly giddy amid the relaunch of whitehouse.gov on the open source Drupal content management system (the very same one we use on Healthcare IT News and its sister publications). Healthcare.gov is also using open source code, a good sign for future feature enhancements and iterative, inexpensive development.

Healthcare.gov’s typefaces, unobtrusive arrangement of content and temperate color palette are a far cry from HHS/CMS sites pre-2008. It’s almost physically painful for me to recall the experience of trying to navigate the old HHS site while contacting press liaisons.

And still, Healthcare.gov could benefit greatly from some enhanced usability. Here’s my quick-hit “refrigerator list” of feature improvements for the site’s noble designers and admins.

1. Front page videos. The site can’t be designed for the user who is happy to be obtaining health insurance. It needs to be designed for the user who is irrational and furious to have to be visiting it at all. The last thing this user wants is a maze of menus and paragraphs of text. The designers have done well organizing a ton of content and using iconography. But even better would be some front-page tutorial videos targeting the site’s key user segments (e.g. “Getting Started: A 2-minute guide for families and individuals,” and variations for employers and people who already have coverage). Short, accessible videos make new information easier. There are good videos on the interior pages, but they should be on the front page. The “Watch Videos” link in the footer misses the target completely.