In the past couple weeks I've spent some time in some of the local hospitals (I'm fine. Don't worry!). Again and again I found myself marveling at the poor first-time user experience of these places.
For example, I had to go to one place at Stanford Hospital. There are signs on the road that say "Stanford Hospital". But, when you get there... well, it isn't entirely clear where "there" is. If you look at a map before you go, you might have a chance of finding your destination. Or not. If you don't, then as you drive in, you have no idea where "the hospital" is. The road layout implies one building is the main location, but I don't think it is (it's called "Stanford Clinic-Boswell", not "Stanford Hospital"). By the time you've gotten "there", of course, you've missed all the parking. So you must go back and find parking (If you are with a patient, and all the visible signs say "visitor parking", should you go somewhere else to find "patient parking"?). From there you must wander around and ask people where to go. Someone tells you to go to "Radiation", but as you walk down the halls you only see signs for "Radiology", and as far as you know you're there for a CT scan (which if you are technically inclined you'll know involves radiation, but otherwise it must be frightening to be seeking out "radiation" which you know isn't healthy).
If this were a software product, we'd say the "out of the box experience" here was not very good. If someone ends up in part of the software and don't know where they are, we'd rate that as bad. The need to consult documentation (ask directions) is probably a failure of software usability. Labels proclaiming dangerous things ("Terminate!", or in this case "Radiation") are generally discouraged, and signs that reflect underlying implementation details (radiation when the user wants "CT") are marks of poor awareness of the user.
As I went through this experience, it was clear to me that this hospital had not done any prototypes, usability studies, or similear research to test out the experience of a first time visitor (or they'd done this and not acted on the findings). Nor did they evaluate the materials they gave people. Consider the map I linked to above: the heading is "SUMC SITE MAP" (what's SUMC?) and one of the parking structures is "SHC Patient Parking" (what is SHC? does it correspond to one of the buildings, like the LPCH Patient Parking presumably does? If so, which building?). Why is it telling people where employee parking is?
In the field of software, we tend to believe that these little details make a difference to the adoption of our products. A hospital doesn't necessarily have the same competitive forces we do (that is, few people probably say "Oh, I find it easier to find my way around Foo Hospital, than Bar Hospital, so I'll go there instead"). However, we also believe that a pleasant user experience in the software makes a happy user, and Don Norman points out that a pleasant experience allows people to solve any problems that they do encounter more effectively. This is certainly applicable to hospitals as well as software. Indeed, given that most people visiting a hospital are probably not in a happy state to start with, this is all probably even more important.
(I could go on to talk about the harsh beeps and other noises that made by some of the medical equipment (what were the designers thinking?) But, that's another topic...)