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Earlier this week, we released some more changes to make our site more mobile-friendly. First, the profile page is now responsive. As with the changes to the other pages, the goal is to allow the user to see all relevant information without having to scroll horizontally. Second, the search form now asks for the browser's location.

We have other user interface changes in mind, and may actually revert back temporarily to older versions to test different aspects. If you run into any problems, please let us know -- it would be very helpful to know about problems that we might not have encountered ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.