A few weeks back I posted about a Forrester report about how bad consumers found health plan web sites.  The Forrester report is online but only for its clients. Forrester did send out an email that non-members can get by signing up here and asking for the emails. This article from Health-IT World includes data from that email and suggests that both navigation and personalization are lacking from health plan sites.

Update: To help those health plans and everyone else out, HHS just came out with a list of to-do’s regarding web-site design.  It’s a big tome available on the HHS web site and, no I haven’t read it. But I did read the Washington Post article that explained why HHS came up with it.  Apparently when Sanjay Koyani, who authored the guidelines for HHS looked at the state of the art in guidelines for web site usability:

"We looked at guidelines inside and outside the government. . . . Nothing was in agreement or backed up by research. . . . The commercial and internal [government] guides were all over the place."

Sounds to me just like the rest of medicine.