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 31, 2014
2014 was a great year for DocSpot, and we look forward to continue to improve the website in 2015. As usual, it feels that there is more to do than we have time for, but we're excited about what's ahead.
Happy New Year!
December 27, 2014
It feels like 2014 passed by very quickly.
Hope you had a merry Christmas!
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.
