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We interviewed some potential users this week to get their feedback on our new user interface. Overall, the results were encouraging. For example, we achieved our main goal of making the search filters more discoverable. People also commented on how much cleaner the new interface looks. We also learned a lot. In our zeal to make the search filters more discoverable, for example, we ended up pushing the search results further down. On small screens, people can't even see the first pair of doctors without scrolling down. Some people liked how the map takes up as much space as it does, and some others didn't care for it so much.

We'll continue to refine the user interface and seek feedback, so don't be too surprised if you see the page layouts changing. If you have thoughts, please let us know.

Some of the work that we do is directly visible to the users of our website. A lot of our work is not easily visible to users, such as improving our data quality. And some of our work falls into yet another category -- work to help search engines make better sense of our site. This week, we worked on adding structured data to our website so that search engines can more easily interpret the data that is presented.

Most of the work is hidden to the user and involves adding tags to tell search engines what the data means. In turn, users might have an easier time finding what they're looking for when they use one of the large search engines.

In a world increasingly dominated by social media, doctors are becoming more concerned about managing their online reputations. Some doctors have even resorted to making their patients sign a gag order before treatment. Despite all the controversy, medical professionals need not fear online reviews: sites like Yahoo! Local and Insider Pages show that the majority of patients rate their doctors 5 out of 5.

At DocSpot, we help patients search across hundreds of different websites to find a doctor who meets their individual needs (for example if they need a primary care doctor who specializes in managing diabetes, or an experienced psychiatrist who accepts Aetna). Occasionally, we'll get providers writing in to have their profiles hidden from public view solely because they never want to be rated. Their concerns piqued our curiosity about the review ecosystem, prompting us to ask, "Are online reviews really that negative?" After analyzing about a quarter million reviews, we found that, despite their bad rap, the majority of online patient reviews are favorable towards their doctors. You can see the detailed results in this infographic. Below are some of the most interesting highlights.

Sixty-five percent of the reviews that we analyzed gave the health care professional the highest rating possible, and 3 out of 4 reviews rated the doctor positively (either a 4 or 5 on a 5 point scale). This finding is surprising since the common wisdom is that only the truly irate bother to fill out online reviews, followed by the sliver of ecstatically pleased customers. Rather than asking patients to sign a gag order, perhaps doctors should be asking their patients to fill out online reviews -- chances are, they'll get top marks.

Our analysis delved further into the content of the reviews. It turns out that it's not all about the medical outcomes: the physician's staff and the office each warranted a mention in over 20% of the reviews. Unsurprisingly, people commonly complained about rudeness, billing hassles, and long wait times. Regardless of how much people value medical expertise, customer service is still important.

By examining recurring phrases in the reviews and correlating the data with specialties, we were able to make some other interesting observations. Cardiologists, for example, were repeatedly credited for saving their patients' lives and oncologists were frequently described as compassionate. Chiropractors, for all the flak that they get from physicians, received the highest average rating (4.61 out of 5) of all health care specialists, while endocrinologists got the lowest rating (a mildly positive 3.56 out of 5).

Despite the glacial pace at which the health care industry can seem to adopt technology (are we really just now talking about cloud-based electronic health records?), online patient reviews are a mainstay of how patients select which doctors to go to -- one out of four Americans turn to the internet for physician quality information. While online reviews can either be positive or negative for any individual doctor, our analysis shows that most online patient reviews are favorable. A health care provider's business is likely to benefit from cultivating patient reviews rather than ignoring or suppressing them.

Footnote: Yes, there have been other studies showing that online reviews tend to be positive. Here's one that examined 4,999 reviews, and here's another that examined 190 reviews. We wanted a broader survey, so we analyzed 248,978 reviews.

This week, we worked on a number of small areas of improvement for the new user interface for the search results page that we released the prior week. For example, it used to be that if you clicked on the white space to the right of a filter option, it would trigger the filter. This could be both unexpected and annoying, so we tightened up the area that registers the clicks for the filters.

The early version also listed the first three options (alphabetically) of each vocabulary (e.g. Insurance or Foreign Language) on the filter panel on the search results page. At someone's suggestion, we now list three of the most common options. We also show the number of providers that match that option so people more quickly get a sense of how many providers would still be in consideration after that particular filter is applied.

We believe in improvements big and small, so if you have any ideas, please let us know.

We've been talking internally about re-designing our search results page for almost a year now. Some users had issues with our old search results page that we wanted to fix. For example, in our user testing, we noticed that people could easily gloss over the filter options. We also wanted to make the page tighter, making better use of the screen real estate. After many discussions and design ideas, we have finally settled on a new design and released it earlier this week.

One major change is that some of the options are immediately shown. Showing all of the options would likely be too overwhelming, so we only show a few from each group of options. As users expand the page, the map now more gracefully expands to take up more of the space. We also put the provider profiles in a two-column format rather than the traditional one-column format. This helps pack information into a page. It is also less likely to give the impression that providers that appear higher in the list are somehow better doctors.

While these changes were just released, there are still some more that we are considering. Before that, however, we want to get some feedback. If you have any thoughts about the new design, please let us know.