Choose Our Client

It’s time to go log in to the system and do the thing. Let’s say that thing involves communicating about medical stuff, and you know vaguely that you’re supposed to log into something rhyming with “Nigh Heart”. The link in the email from the medical provider simply take you to the homepage, so you click on “Log In”, and are presented with an input box “where do you receive care?” and a list of states. You type in your state and are presented with a list of hundreds of Health Systems from which you’re supposed to choose the client of Nigh Heart who you’re interacting with.

You’re not sure who this particular provider is with, so it’s time to play “guess the client”. Maybe you’ve interacted with this particular provider before and already have an account. Maybe you haven’t and have to create one. It doesn’t matter – you guessed wrong. You do a bit of internet sleuthing and realize they’re with a system rhyming with “Evidence”, and they’re in western half of your state, so you try “Evidence Western State”, but that doesn’t work either.

Eventually you pick up the phone and call the office. “Why aren’t you using Nigh Heart?” they ask, and you say, I tried, but I couldn’t see your message in the system. After some back and forth it comes out this particular office is associated with “Evidence Eastern State” for some reason no one alive actually understands. It turns out nearly all of their patients have this same problem, but it’s still your fault for not knowing this. When you say you’d rather not use the online system, they make a note in your file that you’re “not tech savvy”.

This is the flip side of Choose Your SubSite, with the difference that instead of having to know which category of users or which sub-system you belong to, you’re supposed to know the entity with which you’re interacting. The knowledge with which you have to understand what kind of user am I? is very different from the knowledge of which entity am I interacting with through this website? and often not as clear.

This pattern is especially egregious in a health care setting: the individual site or provider you’re working with is often rolled up into a larger entity who you may not be well-aware of, and cannot be reasonably expected to know or keep track of. Furthermore, individuals pursuing health issues are often dealing with multiple providers / offices / sites in the course of managing any particular problem, and those places can sometimes roll up into different health systems which have different client accounts with the main system. It’s more than you can reasonably expect someone to keep track of.

You might have correctly guessed that my example is MyChart but I’ve noticed this same pattern with many other sites, most notably Slack (who I suspect has product reasons for this).

Whatever the excuse, requiring people logging into a website or app to know in advance which entity they want to interact with through that website or app is frustrating. Requiring multiple login accounts per internet domain name is user-hostile.