Moving the filter menu
December 20, 2014
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.
December 20, 2014
Continuing our series of user interface changes, we have moved the filter menu closer to the actual search results. The positioning of the filters has long been a challenge for us. On one hand, we want the filters to be prominent enough that users will notice them. To that end, we have tried out highlighting the most common options by showing them on the search results page (without needing any clicks). On other hand, we don't want the overwhelm the user with too many choices. Earlier this year, we hid the most common options with menus and moved the filters to a menu bar just underneath the header. User testing showed that some users were unaware of the feature. As a result, we've now moved the filter bar further away from the header to make it more distinct, and to make it easier for users to associate it with the search results below.
We still have some more changes on the search results page, and we hope to overhaul the profile page in 2015. Let us know if you have any suggestions.
December 12, 2014
A while back, we introduced changes to our layout to make it adapt to differently sized browser windows. Our biggest concern then was to have the page render well on smaller form factors, such as mobile and tablet. One of the often overlooked form factors is the wide desktop. Typically, sites will simply impose a maximum width, leaving much space on either side unused.
Today, we've rolled out some changes to better use the space on either side. If you are viewing the site on a wide desktop monitor, and you expand the window to take up the entire width of your screen, you should see the providers presented in an array, hopefully making it easier to scan through the results. We hope to continue to tweak the visual design over the next few weeks.
December 06, 2014
This week, we rolled out some changes to filter out some unwanted web traffic. While we want this site to be a useful resource to patients looking for prospective doctors, there are certain pages that we don't want crawled by bots, and we have indicated so via a widespread method known as robots.txt. It turns out that many of the visits to our site by robots do not abide by that convention. Consequently, we have implemented some changes to help restrict those visits. We're still in the early stages of these algorithms, and we're bound to be too aggressive in some ways, and not aggressive enough in others.
If you're a regular user seeing a page that your IP address has been banned, please let us know and we'll take a look. Please include your IP address when you contact us.
November 26, 2014
In an effort to streamline the search results page, we have added a "Related Searches" section at the bottom of the page. It used to be that if someone searched for a condition such as diabetes, we would prioritize the providers that have explicitly listed the condition as a clinical interest and then automatically include providers in related specialties below. Between the two sections would be a message to help explain the separation. We found that the separation made the search results more confusing and have eliminated the bottom section. Instead, we list relevant searches below so that users can easily pursue those options if interested.
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 21, 2014
We've been working on making the search results page easier to understand, and now have a series of incremental changes to roll out over the next month or two.
To kick off this series today, we're releasing some changes to highlight relevant clinical interests. For example, if someone were to search for "diabetes," we might show a provider that has listed "gestational diabetes" as a clinical interest, as we used to do. The change is that now we emphasize that relevant clinical interests, since each provider may have indicated multiple interests. We've also rearranged parts of the provider summaries. We still have many more changes to complete, so stay tuned.