WoltersKluwer Health: Demonstrating basic flaws

Inattention to detail and clumsiness distort the intended imprssion of an online demonstration.

The Site

WoltersKluwer Health is a provider of information and research data for medical and health care professionals. Its website helps to explain what that means by offering four Product Demos on its home page alongside links to product sites and case studies.

Clicking on the ‘Nursing Drug Guide’ demo link opens a secondary browser window. This is dominated by a large image of a Palm Pilot, showing how the Drug Guide can be displayed. Text to the left of the image invites visitors to “Click ‘next’” for a demo looking up the drug ‘cefaclor’. However, there is no ‘next’ button or prompt anywhere on the page, and the ‘Click next’ line itself is not hyperlinked. To activate the demo visitors have to click on a stylised arrowhead in the bottom right corner of the page. When using the Internet Explorer 6 browser on a PC, this arrow is invisible unless scrolling down or expanding the secondary window. Mousing over the arrowhead reveals the word ‘next’.

The Takeaway

Online demonstrations can be a simple and effective way to show off the scope of an unfamiliar product or distinguish it from rival offerings. So far so appropriate for WoltersKluwer Health, but the inattention to detail and resulting clumsy start to its Nursing Drug Guide demo create entirely the opposite impression to the one it wants to give of its information management.

WoltersKluwer Health makes two errors that combine to compound the difficulty in accessing the demo. First, and most obvious, is the lack of correlation between the instruction given to users (Click ‘next’) and the action they need to perform (mousing over or clicking the stylised arrowhead). Second, the positioning of the arrowhead at the opposite extreme of the page, separated from the text by the Palm Pilot illustration, makes it that much harder for users to intuit what to do instead. A basic hyperlink from the instruction would be so much simpler and effective.

The fact that the demo is on a separate site, albeit one within the WoltersKluwer Health family, may give a clue as to how the problem has persisted. It suggests there is no centralised control over the division’s sites, meaning no one is taking an overview or has the authority to intervene.

First published on 12 October, 2004