This is a copy of the letter that I sent to webmaster@labcorp.com this morning regarding my experience with the Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp) web site. LabCorp is a huge company that does medical testing and my doctor sent me there for some routine tests for my physical.

Hello,
I've never written a rant letter like this to a big corporation but this morning I couldn't help it. LabCorp doesn't seem to want consumers to use their web site. I set out this morning with what I imagined to be a fairly simple task: "Find the hours of the LabCorp at 2850 Telegraph in Berkeley, California". Here are some of the steps that I took and what I ran into:

1. Google "LabCorp 2850 Telegraph" (This will be faster than calling them.)
I get nothing for labcorp.com in the first 10 pages of results only, business directory listings without the hours.

2. Google "LabCorp"
The top result is a page titled "Welcome to Laboratory Corporation of America". I guess that is "LabCorp", so I click on it.

3. Welcome to "Welcome to LabCorp"
I am greeted by a big picture of an angry looking man with his arms crossed, but it says "Welcome to LabCorp" so I know I'm in the right place. The blurb on the home page tells me a bunch of information about how big and awesome LabCorp is, with $3.6 billion in revenues, 25,000 employees, 370,000 specimens daily, the NYSE ticker, etc. Wow, LabCorp is a big impressive corporation!

4. Where do I click for locations?
The two big buttons in the middle of the page say "For the New York area www.chooseLabCorp.com" (OK, that's not me, I'm in California) and the other says "Physicians click here to set up a LabCorp Account or call 1-888-LABCORP" (OK, that's not me either).

5. Let's glance at the navigation.
Ugh, there's tons of navigation links with long names and the font is really small, so I start reading down the left bar. "Home"? Nope I'm already on the home page. "About..."? No, I already know they get "370,000 specimens daily". "Corporate Governance"? Huh? "Centers of Excellence"? Excellent, That could be it! Ut oh, a sub menu popped out, what do I pick here, "Center for Esoteric Testing", "Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology", "DIANON Systems", "Esoterix"? Ah, "US LABS", I'm in the United States and I need to find a lab, perfect!

6. "US LABS is an esoteric anatomic pathology laboratory providing critical cancer screening, diagnosis, prognosis and genetic analysis."
WTF? All of the navigation is gone and I'm anchored to the middle of a page that seems to list a bunch of companies that LabCorp owns or something, so I click the back button.

7. O.K., the navigation is insane... Let's use the search box.
I search for "2850 Telegraph", no results, "telegraph", no results, "Berkeley" (I know there are like five LabCorp locations in Berkeley), still no results. I think perhaps search doesn't work at all, so I search for "lab". The top result is a link to the 2000 Annual Report. I am mildly interested to find out if they had "370,000 specimens daily" back then but now I'm starting to get distracted. I also want to add that the most noticeable thing on the search result page is a button to download Adobe's Acrobat Reader software. It's almost as big as their logo.

8. Calm down Mark, you've been building web pages for over twelve years, you CAN figure this site out!
Yeh, how did I miss that small, purple tab on a purple background along the top edge of the page labeled with two lines of tiny text that says "Patient Service Center Locator"? I click it and see a Star Trek version of the LabCorp logo and a bunch of text. Now what? There's a big button that says "Back" (which is great because I've gotten tired of using my web browser's normal "Back" button while shuffling around this information architecture train wreck). Wait, I see a "click here" link, I'm going for it!

9. Cool, this page uses frames, a very hip, 1997, retro aesthetic touch!
I think I made it! After scrolling down past four paragraphs of text that use new and exciting type faces that I haven't seen yet on other parts of the site, I find the elusive locator form. There is a paragraph about health plans with a yes/no field (which I ignore), two sets of radio buttons for various options (some of which have footnotes in red text, but I still ignore them) and four fields for address information. I'm not taking any chances with my address so I enter the address of the LabCorp location "2850 Telegraph" and type in "Berkeley" for the city and click the "Find PSC" button (because "Reset" didn't seem like the right button).

10. Alright, a bunch of MapQuest branded maps!

• Berkeley (Alameda County) CA (US)
• Berkeley (Saint Louis County) MO (US)
• Berkeley (Cook County) IL (US)
• Berkeley (Providence County) RI (US)
• Berkeley (Berkeley County) WV (US)
• Berkeley (Hernando County) FL (US)
• Berkeley (Ocean County) NJ (US)
• Berkeley (Albemarle County) VA (US)
• Berkeley (Charles City County) VA (US)
• Berkeley (Pierce County) WA (US)

I click on the first one and get a page of 14 more MapQuest maps. The one I'm looking for is the second one on the list. Yeh, they open at 8:00 AM today. I probably should have just started at MapQuest.

Basically, LabCorp's web presence seems to be a horrific example of a corporate web site that has been designed by committee and cobbled together over the years to satisfy the whims of various competing stakeholders with the inward-looking, pomp and circumstance of stock photography, investor annual reports, and no focus on simple business objectives (like getting customers to lab locations).

One more (slightly more geeky and obscure) note about LabCorp's site; the company has a page stating that they are "committed to implementing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)". This an important law that deals with privacy issues and I'm glad that LabCorp is paying attention to it but they might also want to take a look into sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act. With its frames, weird pop out navigation menus, and graphical buttons without text alternatives, the site would be nearly impossible to use for people with impaired vision. To get a quick idea of what their experience would be like, turn off images in your web browser and visit the LabCorp home page.

I doubt that my long-winded, unfriendly rant will win any business for my employer (Clear Ink - a 40 person web marketing firm in Berkeley), but I thought it might be helpful to share. I posted this letter on my company blog about internet marketing if you want to post back any comments publicly. <http://clearnightsky.com/node/335>

Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling rant.

-- Mark Celsor

LabCorp also has some strange regulations about linking to them. I'll disregard them, because I imagine Yahoo and Google probably did as well.

In the past I've written about ThirdVoice:

ThirdVoice originally allowed users to post sticky notes on web sites that, for those with ThirdVoice installed, looked like they appeared on the web sites themselves. Web properties cried foul, that their creative work was being modified without permission. I always came down on the side of the user, who knowingly was combining a site’s content with a requested separate source of annotation, and presenting information however they saw fit.

This idea is back with Trailfire, and it has a definite Web 2.0 bent to it. I installed Trailfire and with only a few minutes usage I'm impressed and eager to share it. Here's how they describe it:

Trailfire is a hosted service that enables anyone to comment on any web page. Place a 'trail mark' on a page with your comments or notes. A trail mark can contain text, images, videos and other media types. When you give several marks the same 'trail name' you are forming your own navigation path on the web. We call this a 'Trail'.

I've created my first trail, a mini-tour of Clear Ink sites. I'll add some new trails as my experiment continues.

Web 2.0 (remember that?) is, among other things, about open, platform-independent systems, not walled gardens with unnecessary restrictions on access and participation. The rise of browser-based applications means that participation needn't be arbitrarily restricted, for instance, to Windows PCs. A social network based on a Windows+Outlook-only application is really a network of Windows+Outlook users, which, while pretty big, still unnecessarily limits the quality of the participants.

To be Web 2.0, you have to provide your customers with that complete Web 2.0 experience. I participated a bump on the road today when I tried to go to a webinar offered by Jot to explain their Web 2.0 wiki application, JotSpot. JotSpot itself works fine on my Macintosh, and is a good example of the sort of open application that encompasses the entire universe of Internet-connected users. For some reason, however, when I clicked the link to the webinar, I got the message: "Your Operating System Is Not Supported. We currently support Windows only." It turns out that Jot, supposedly a Web 2.0 company, has saddled itself with "GoToMeeting", a decidedly Web 1.0 application.

Customer experience should have continuity, not restrictions like this. If you sell a Windows-only application, go ahead and use GoToMeeting; I understand it works fine for that kind of company. But if you'd like to emerge from 2002 and move to the Web 2.0 customer experience, avoid this kind of customer-adverse setup.

In a previous post, I likened the blogosphere to the Internet's sensory system. In increasing measure, it is also becoming a critical part of the world's immune system.  The rapid response and containment of SARS in 2003 was due in part to an effort to scrape and mine data from multiple online sources into a Canadian system called GPHIN. By collecting incident reports and acting to isolate outbreaks, SARS didn't become a pandemic. Attention now turns to stopping a possible avian flu pandemic.

Larry Brilliant's TED wish this year is to expand GPHIN to a richer set of data sources: the blogosphere.  It seems to me that the GPHIN route may suffer from its bureaucratic entanglement (the Canadian government), and I'm leery about forestalling the end of the world using Microsoft software. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a lot of openness on the part of Brilliant or TED wish management to seriously consider alternatives. (If I see that they do, I'll be quick to report it.)

Fortunately, there are a number of efforts underway to mine the blogosphere for early detection and early response in a more open-system manner. These efforts are reported on in (of all places) the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and it's worth a look.