Tales of Hoffman

Zagat Follow-Up

Behold the power of Blogs.

About two weeks ago, I wrote a rant/post regarding what I thought was a mistake in the redesign of Zagat.com. Mark picked it up for thisisbroken.com and the requisite increase in traffic to this site ensued.

In the last two days there have been two developments on this front. First of all I get a personal email from Nina Zagat herself (cool!), letting me know that she's seen my comments and that they were "looking into" the change I suggested. So, one point to the Zagat organization for actually tracking what their users are saying and responding to it (and not with a faceless, "thanks for your feedback email" either).

Now, I notice an entry on the blog for Catalyst Group Design, who apparently worked on the redesign actaully pointing to both my post and the entry/accompanying comments on thisis broken.com. Two points to CoFactors for acknowleding that any design project is iterative and that they too take note of what's being said about their work.

My point here is not to pat myself on the back for making waves (although if I can get them to actually make the change I suggest, I'm sure all of Westchester County shall cheer and throw a parade in my honor), but to take note that in an earlier, pre-blog world, I would have just stewed about the problem, cursed out Zagat.com and the faceless design consultants they work with, and probably used the product less. That's not what happened here.

And as many have said before me, it's all about the dialogue. I'm really happy to be a part of it.

Initiate Transition Phase...

In just a few weeks (sometime in mid-may), the 10th anniversary of my starting work at good ol' Physicians' Online will come to pass. That anniversary means that I've been working on the "Medical Web" for 8 of the last 10 years on what have been, arguably, the leading websites for physicians (POL, CareInsite, WebMD Physician and now Medscape). That's a long time and an accomplishment of which I'm pretty darn proud.

After a lot of thinking in the past few months, however, I've decided that it's time for a change. There are a ton of exciting things going on (aren't we in the middle of the birth of Web 2.0?) and not all of them involve medical information and CME.

So, I'm moving on. I've got about two more weeks left here at Medscape/WebMD and then I'm off to join Cablevision as Director of their Optonline.net site. I'm very excited to be able to bring some fresh ideas to the consumer web portal space, and really believe that, as an organization, Cablevision is in a unique position to do some very cool things.

What happens here? Probably nothing too radical. I'll keep posting. Probably a bit less about the Medical Web, but I've still got opinions on that and you'll still see them here. ;-)

I'll try not to get too dewey-eyed over the next two weeks, but transitions like this tend to bring out the sentimentalist in me. I'll keep you posted .

Zagat.com Redesign Follies

They've launched a redesigned Zagat.com and, at least for how I use it, they've ruined the site. I grant that this is related to the unique circumstances of where I live, which is in the northern suburbs of NYC (Westchester County). Bear with me here, because this problem is probably more related to the local geography than anything else, but it's annoying nonetheless.

When Zagat publishes their print guides, they publish a NYC edition (of course) and a separate "Southern NY and Connecticut" edition. The latter is the one I use. Under their old site design, one could choose their location based on the print editions that were available. For me, perfect. I was able to search for restaurants here in Westchester (and there are quite a few good ones) without having to wade through all the thousands of listings for the NYC edition.

I'm sure someone at Zagat decided it would be better if users could create their own "locations." Therefore, you can now go to the site and put in an actual street address (say, your home) and then set a radius (5 mi., 10 mi., 50 mi., etc.) for your search. In the abstract, that was probably a good idea. The bad idea was taking away the ability to set your location based on the print edition of Zagat altogether. There's a reason why the print editions are segragated the way they are, and not making them available as "locations" on the website was a huge mistake.

With the new design, the best I can do is set a radius around my house, which invariably, is way too small. Or if I try to make it bigger to include most of Westchester, then I'm finding restaurants in NYC (if I want to go into the city, I'll seach for a city restaurant, thank you) or even Long Island (um, I'm not going across the Whitestone Bridge for a burger, thank you again).

This doesn't make sense at all, and it's a tirumphant failure of a "neat functionality idea" winning out over common sense. If anyone from Zagat.com is reading this, please give me back the ability to set "Southern NY State" as my location, and then I'll stop whining.

Nielsen on Medical Usability

I respect all that Jakob Nielsen has done for the world of usability on the web. But I only find his essays (and site) to be really useful about 40% of the time, and this week's entry on Medical Usability is a really good example of that 40% rule.

It's basically a rehash of a JAMA article that covered a study of usability in a hospital order entry system. It'll come to no surprise to most of the readers -- of this blog, at least -- that from a usability angle, this particular system failed miserably. After recapping the study in his own words, Jakob does manage to score some points by describing his efforts to find out more, both on the JAMA site itself and on he site of the University of the original researcher. Bottom line? University = Bad. JAMA = Pretty good.

To me, both Jakob's article and the original study fall into the category of "So, what else is new?" I think if you go into any organization and look at their internal applications, you are going to find a three-ring circus of usability problems. The people that put together these systems almost never take usability into account and the end product shows.

If I want to request a day off, for instance, it takes 11 clicks (and a login) to complete that task. If you are responsible for coding internal HR, Intranet or other support systems, please buy this book, or this book, or this one. Better yet, get all three...read them and then start over.

Telemedicine 1924

click for much larger size....(via boingboing)