Posted on 10/09/2013 2:42:00 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
.............For President Barack Obama, glitches involving his signature legislation are an unwelcome twist. A devoted smartphone user, his political campaigns were models of high-tech efficiency. Yet the problems that have surfaced so far with healthcare.gov don't even involve the site's more complicated functions.
Allowing consumers to browse anonymously was one of the recommendations of Enroll UX 2014, a $3 million, 14-month project to design an optimal user experience for the insurance marketplaces. The well-known San Francisco design firm IDEO led the project and undertook extensive consumer interviews to create an easy-to-use site.
"The first thing people said to us is, 'I need to be able to understand what my options are,'" said Sam Karp, vice president of programs at the California HealthCare Foundation. The nonprofit helped organize and finance Enroll UX 2014, which also involved the federal government and 11 states.
Karp said he was concerned when he tried the federal website last week and found that anonymous shopping wasn't part of it. He considers the omission a "major design flaw."
"That was a design recommendation and they didn't do it," Karp said. While several states that built their own online marketplaces do allow for window shopping, the federal site serving 36 states does not.......
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
Just wait until people try seeing a doctor (make that, a physician's assistant or some such).
I bet all these IT companies that did this stuff are Obama supporters.
Obama is America’s glitche
Yeah, but they had good intentions, that’s all that counts!
In some circles, they use things called REQUIREMENTS. I guess they never thought about going down that road.
You made two great points - that this whole thing is about control of us (which requires our information) and that if people think signing up is hard, wait til they try and use it!!
BTW, just heard on FOX, prisons are unloading their inmates on to Obamacare (Medicaid). Now the feds (tax payers) will pay for their drug additions, HIV and various issues. All leading to higher premiums and deductibles, within Obamacare.
You made two great points - that this whole thing is about control of us (which requires our information) and that if people think signing up is hard, wait til they try and use it!!
Obie and his website: YOU BUILT THAT! Hahaha. Dumbing down the educational system works great until you need competence.
As a web/it guy, heres what really floors me: 0 has loyal soldiers in the digital world who do ALOT better work than what ive seen on those sites. And they were not used for some reason. The flaws and errors ive seen and heard about are in the least-amaturish. Something I would expect out of low level college interns. There was clearly a lack of UI testing, unit testing, and load balancing which should have been known during the initial design phase.
if I were a web/sofware company, I would not want my name attached to this. Just my professional opinion.
*Kludge - a badly assembled collection of parts hastily assembled to serve some particular purpose (often used to refer to computing systems or software that has been badly put together). Source.
However, readers should remember that nobamacare is merely a bridge to single-payer.
My guess is that nobody is anonymous anymore, so why pay more in software design costs to pretend?
I’m wondering how many of those sites are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
Probably all of them. Government workers, you know. XML injection would probably crash them.
I think its caused by numerous jokers logging in with fake data based on Obamas various names / social security numbers / birth dates / addresses / ....etc
Thats my thought as well. Obama probably threw these multi million dollar contracts to his incompetent supporters.
SO YER SAYIN..’IT’S A POOR WORKMAN WHO BLAMES HIS TOOLS’ ?
Amen!
“Seems the IT types the Governmnt hires are either incompetent or security risks..”
This is not always true. I was an IT contractor/project leader for a large DMV project. The requirements and general design phase was unbelievable. The Users of Record were govt appointees who on occasion would not show up for meetings, new little about the business, and just had that I don’t care attitude. They realize that they would not be accountable for production phase output since they would no longer in their current position.
I'm sure we'll know soon from the hacker attacks to come.
I've also wondered if these sites were designed with hacking vulnerabilities built in. Would not surprise me a bit.
“I’ve also wondered if these sites were designed with hacking vulnerabilities built in”
I doubt it. Fox News reported that the WSJ had Independent IT ‘experts’ review the Obamacare code. They found functionally meaningless code spread across the entire application. IMO, it was ‘off the shelf’ processes modified for Obamacare.
Wasn’t the site designed by a Canadian firm to the tune of well over $1,000,000,000?
Just search “Obamacare hacked” and you will see multiple state exchanges were already hacked.
Since part of the requirement is a link to your financial information, the risk of ID fraud is massive.
You would be safer leaving your wallet on the sidewalk in South Chicago for a week than entering your credentials into Obamacare.
Canadian Design Team
A few years ago, I upgraded a vendors software package. After the upgrade, it worked under light load. Once a modest load was applied, a web server process would grab 100% of CPU. The vendor blamed my setup. I was able to find a workaround by just recycling the process. After a couple of months, the vendor came back with a hotfix for their code..
Not bad for drunks. eh?
“if I were a web/sofware company, I would not want my name attached to this. Just my professional opinion.”
You’d have to have shame to feel like that. How many libs have shame?

Lets just make this shut down hurt Vets, Military, KIA survivors, seniors, kids with cancer as we can, the Gutless Old Party will then cave in to our demands. So I can get back to my golf game and I can send Mooch on another vacation and shopping binge so she won't holler at me. She can take her mom,the dogs and the girls and pay the girls as her STAFFERS
Technically speaking, requirements and design are two distinct deliverables when building an IT system. It may be a requirement to have users wait no longer than 2 minutes for a response; you might achieve that requirement by using load-balancing servers, or a distributed architecture.
A requirement tells what is needed; design tells how you achieve it.
Regardless, it doesn't sound like HealthCare.gov did a very good job with either requirements or design.
Not many, but this business is really a small world. I know leftfies on 0’s task force. Even THEY can’t believe the crap errors on that website. Trust me, healthcare.gov is the best thing going for the GOP with a spine right now. For every error, every DDNS problem, every screen going blank is a win for our side. They loose ground every time it happens to someone. It’s 2013. Your web site doesn’t work, customers don’t come back. And politics has nothing to do with it. It’s the way the digital world works.
I’ve been in this field for almost 14 years now. And this is among the biggest meltdowns I’ve seen of a major web site ever. If the dems were smart, the failed web service is their way out of this mess. Just say, “We’re gonna delay this (for a year) while we get the bugs worked out.” Of course that delay means it’s back up and running - just 30 days before the midterms - and they can’t afford that.
In fact, as a digital expert I’ll go one step further. Here’s proof on how BAD that web site is: With all the commotion about the ACA, they should be self-promoting, bragging about how many signups. If it were me, you’d see a number on the upper right (or a progress bar) showing how many signups so far.
But you don’t see that. In fact, no one can get even an approximate number from the thugs in DC.
That’s because it’s not working. The number of signups are embarrassing to them, and my sources tell me the backend of the system (the part we don’t see) is so screwed up, they can’t get an accurate number of how many have completed their signup process.
My suggestion to our side: Don’t sign up. Let this system crash under its own bureaucracy. It’s a lesson for those who think a web system can be built by a political ideology, and not digital experts.
Ping for later
I know someone who had a 20+ year career of great success in private-industry IT. Brilliant woman. She was hired to work on this mess. When she saw what a nightmare it was, she went up the ladder, warning and complaining. She was fired. She doesn’t qualify as a whistleblower but has certainly been vindicated.
That’s a better way of putting it!
Nothing here is Dear Leader's fault. Don't even think it.
Courtesy of MaskedMan, I found this link very enlightening. If you read it carefully, you can get a real sense of what big, macro things went wrong with this project, and by extension, why those flaws predict a terminal illlness for “Obamaware:”
Let’s all hope that Obamaware is as successful as North Korean agriculture. Workers of the Socialist Vanguard, forward!
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