Group name

„Make ePA work again“

Insights

We looked into the ePA applications of our health insurance companies. One of the applications did not work at all (screenshot below).

For the other application the registration process turned out to be quite complicated, as we were presented with the options to either receive a physical letter with a one time sign in code or a authentication by state issued ID. We decided to go for the latter.

As the authentication self was outsourced to a secondary company we were required to install another app and pass a set of privacy statements. In the end the registration worked, but the ePA could not be used as it required an higher android version.

We also found a desktop application with a dedicated demo mode, which we can use for our first analysis. We already encountered some problems like bugs with this demo mode.

In general, our first impression is that, on the one hand, the technical implementation of the applications is immature or not functional at all, and on the other hand, the registration process is too complicated for a large part of the presumed target group.

W-Questions

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?

We want to improve the general experience for users with using the applications. Therefore we want to evaluate the application from a user-centric point of view to analyze the challenges and problems users have to face when using it

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful? Why is that an interesting problem?

An evaluation of an application from an user-centric point of view with various scientific methods from the field of HCI will hopefully lead to an measurable improvement of its usability for the target group.

Who are your intended stakeholders? And who might be the indirect stakeholders?

As we are trying to improve the user interface and general user experience, the direct stakeholders would be the users of the applications. The applications developers can be considered as indirect stakeholders. Therefore our work might have an impact on their part.

Reflexion

We both did some research on our own and then came together to discuss our findings and write this blog post. We learned that the ePA applications deliver a bad user experience across different platforms/providers or do not work at all. We were a little confused about the specifics of the assignment and the use of the provided tools. We were not quite sure how the assignment had to be handed in.