Comparing Plans--More Horrible Interface Design

It's been a few days since I posted. It was more fun keeping up on the government shutdown than comparing plans. And since I got to the point where I have to choose, I figured some of the pressure was off.

Last night as I was watching the final passage of the final deals, I logged into healthcare.gov again. I was able to log in but not able to continue my application. This morning I tried again and got in without any issues.

So, for the first time I decided to use the little Compare check box. You can see it checked in the picture below.

It seems like it would be a nice feature. You scroll through the long list of similarly named plans with small but significant differences. And you see one you'd like. So you click Compare.

Seems useful, right? I mean, that's why there's a list of dozens of plans--to compare the differences, right.

But, what should be a useful feature is made super annoying by this:

Yes, the designers of this page, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the user needs to be told that the plan whose Compare check box I just checked has been added to my compare list. I just added it, I don't need you to tell me--just show the check mark in the check box! But, that's not why this design decision is so horrible. No. If all it did was tell I did what I just asked it to do, that would be annoying, but not enough to get me to write a post about it. No, it does something worse.

The designers of this page decided that the best way to notify me that I did what I just did is to scroll to the top of the screen to the navigation bar to put the notification on the navigation bar! Hey, why not just go through the stack of books on my nightstand and slip all the book marks, while you're at it? Ugh! Now I have to go through that whole list again--the list of similarly named plans with small differences that might be significant. Yeah, make me lose my place each time I want to add a plan to the compare list because some moron knows nothing about UI design.

Grrr...

Anyway, if you click the compare region at the top, you get this screen:

I have 4 plans that I chose to compare for this preliminary comparison. I'll add more later. I have a big enough screen that I can certainly see more than 3 if the site is willing to show me more than 3. But, it looks like 3 is the limit.