Continuing the adaptation for mobile browsers
June 28, 2013
At DocSpot, our mission is to connect people with the right health care by helping them navigate publicly available information. We believe the first step of that mission is to help connect people with an appropriate medical provider, and we look forward to helping people navigate other aspects of their care as the opportunities arise. We are just at the start of that mission, so we hope you will come back often to see how things are developing.
An underlying philosophy of our work is that right care means different things to different people. We also recognize that doctors are multidimensional people. So, instead of trying to determine which doctors are "better" than others, we offer a variety of filter options that individuals can apply to more quickly discover providers that fit their needs.
June 28, 2013
This week, we released a round of changes to make the search results page more mobile-friendly. If you load the search results page from your mobile browser, you should the results stacked up in a single column for easier browsing. This results in a very long page, but allows the user to just scroll in one direction, rather than two.
If you've tried the new interface on your mobile device, we'd like to know about your experience.
June 21, 2013
We recently had a conversation with someone that prompted us to check how much of our traffic comes from smartphones and tablets -- we were surprised by the results. We had been operating under the assumption that people who seriously searched for doctors would do so in front of their large desktop monitors. The data shows, however, that a significant percentage of our traffic is from the newer platforms. So, we're starting to do something about this.
Some of you might have noticed that the search form on our home page is now more mobile-friendly ("responsive" is a recent buzzword). Next week, we plan on rolling out some changes that will make the search results page more responsive to smaller screens. Stay tuned.
June 14, 2013
If you've visited our search form today, you might have noticed that it's different. There are fewer tabs to click on. We used to separate the search functionality into different forms. If you wanted to search by a specialty, you would use the default text box. If you wanted to search by name, you had to first click the search-by-name tab to reveal the appropriate form. If you wanted to search for hospitals in a certain area, there was yet another form to use. Sometimes, when I want to quickly look up a doctor's profile, I would use the wrong form. At that point, we knew that we had to change the user interface to make searching easier.
Today, we released our new search form that combines all of the old forms into one. That means, you can use the default search box and type in a name, a specialty, or "hospitals" to see results. Try it out and let us know what you think.
June 09, 2013
Our user testing highlighted how users can misspell terms and not get any results back. I've made such mistakes myself (for example, opthamologist). This past week, we developed some infrastructure to help users with commonly misspelled terms. It hasn't been deployed yet, but should be released within the next two weeks. After that, as it learns more and more misspellings, the system should be able to handle a wider range of user input.
This is just one of many user improvements on our list. If you have any other ideas, please let us know.
May 31, 2013
This week, we rolled out a number of user interface changes on the profile page. The changes are in response to some valuable feedback that people gave when we conducted user testing. For example, we found out that users often are not interested in knowing the sources of the information in a profile and were sometimes confused by the text below the profile summary. In response, we've moved the box of sources down below the profile; somewhat like footnotes. We've also made a distinction between ratings and reviews, where we call the numerical score a rating, and the textual comment a review. Many sources will have both a numerical component as well as a text component. Some only have text, and others only have a numerical score. In general, we try to summarize the numerical scores. We also introduced a button on the profile page near the top right corner to help people go back to the search results page if that's where they came from.
We're not done with revisions from this latest round of testing, so don't be surprised if you see more changes. As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions.