User feedback

Have you ever stared at a word for so long that it starts to look funny to you? I'm pretty sure this has happened to me with words as diverse and, well, embarrassingly normal, as 'roof', 'color', 'chimney', and 'fridge'. (Fortunately, they look fine to me now, so don't worry too much.)

Unfortunately, it seems that the opposite happens when you spend too much time looking at a website. It doesn't start to look funny; in fact, the things that may have looked odd at first start to seem completely normal, and you'll probably even forget that they ever looked strange to you at all. This is why we value user feedback - hopefully none of our users spends quite as much time on our site as we do (if you do, you should probably go out and play - or get back to your own job), so your perspective is different from ours, and we need to hear it. We want to know what's intuitive, what's abysmally counter-intuitive, what you want to see that we don't currently have, what you do see but honestly would rather not.

One thing we've been learning from the user feedback we've gotten so far is that the sheer length of the lists of medical schools, professional interests, insurance plans, etc. in our filters can be, to make a large understatement, a bit overwhelming. I, with my irreparably skewed perspective, may be familiar enough with the site that I have an idea of what's in the list, how it's organized, when it will stop, and how I can efficiently use it to hone in on what I'm looking for - but it doesn't make as much sense to someone seeing it for the first time. Some people told us the lists are so long they wouldn't look through them; others see them and then assume that just scanning through the results of their initial search is the most efficient way to find an appropriate provider. If you want to find a provider who accepts Blue Cross insurance, attended Stanford for medical school, and treats a lot of patients with high blood pressure, you're something close to infinitely better off if you use the filters than if you look through the list of search results until you find the right doctor - but this isn't necessarily obvious, and we want to fix that.

The plus side of having unmanageably long lists of options is that we really do have a huge breadth and depth of information on doctors and other health care providers, and we've spent a lot of time standardizing and organizing it to make it digestible. It's just a matter of making it easy to use at the same time. This could involve using drop-down menus instead of lists, adding search boxes for people to type in the medical school or insurance company they're looking for, organizing the lists differently (for example, separating medical schools into tiers based on their rankings), or something else entirely. As we consider these and other potential changes, we'd love to hear your thoughts at our discussion boards. Just don't stay there so long that 'forum' starts to look funny - I hear that can happen.