Here is one reason why Healthcare.gov is so slow

The Healthcare.gov insurance application process is slow and repetitive for multi-person households. It asks the same set of questions about each member of the household -- whether they are applying for insurance or not. Rather than put multiple items on a single form page, the system asks for one or two pieces of information at a time. To proceed to the next question, the applicant must press a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button.




As I proceeded through an application, I noticed the delay between my pressing   SAVE & CONTINUE  and the presentation of the next question was getting rather long -- often requiring I wait 10 to 20 seconds, or more.

Chrome's developer tools confirmed that it is indeed taking taking a long time to submit data with each press of a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button.





Every time I press a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button, the entire application and the results of all processing (data retrieved by back end systems, and history) are resubmitted to the server, and the entire results are then returned by the server. In my case, this was nearly 1 megabyte of data.

The good news is that the response is gzipped, and only about 50 kilobytes. However, the data is sent to the server uncompressed -- nearly 1 megabyte of data each time I progress to a new application question. Nearly 100 of these exchanges occurred as I completed my application.

Submitting the entire application (and results of back end data lookup) at every step slows an already tedious process. It also adds unnecessary load on the Healthcare.gov networks and servers.



This is not how one designs a high-performing web site.

For security reasons

After logging into the HP Home & Home Office Store, don't click on the plus sign on the step showing that you are logged in. If you do, it will log you out.

However, it will kindly inform you that you have an account with them. And for security reasons, they will display your email address twice within the same box.



Interesting feature. Typically, clicking a plus sign in a GUI gives you more information, not less.

Saved

While writing the previous post, I clicked the Save As Draft button above.





Nice. It says "Saved" and it says "Post was not saved due to form errors". Which is it? Was it saved or not?
.

Complexity

@LAKing: This form just keeps getting better. This is a form error page.



Do not enter a country when selecting a state for place of birth? I can't see the part of the form asking for place of birth, but if the instructions are as complex as what I see for entering a name, I'm surprised there aren't more errors being reported.

If you have no first name or middle name, select No First Name (NFN) or No Middle Name (NMN), as appropriate. If you only have initials in your name, enter the initial(s) (without the period) and select Initial Only (IO). If you are a "Jr.," "Sr.," "II," etc., enter this under Suffix.

How many new acronyms can users be introduced to in order to fill out a form?  What if your middle name is a digit? What if you have more than three names? If they're going to spell out specific instructions with acronyms, they might as well deal with all the possibilities. Right? ;)


This has to be a government form made more confusing by a government software system.

The password is already in use with another account

“This is what I call password authentication fail. =P =|” - @ImadJomaa

Wow! If the message is correct, this system appears to be disclosing passwords used by other users.