A good idea, and even good data, is not enough without good user experience
Finding a doctor can be a hard task, but it shouldn’t be.
We set out to make finding the exact doctor you need fast, easy and enjoyable. We sent out a survey to more than 12,000-area doctors asking them to vote on the best doctors in the area. We then asked the doctors with the most votes for additional information: Addresses, phone numbers, insurance accepted, hospital affiliations, etc.
We took that data and built a website around it. In a matter of seconds, you can find a cardiologist in Washington, DC that takes Carefirst insurance and was voted one of the best by her peers.
We’ve had this Top Doctors feature for a number of years, but it hasn’t been particularly usable. You can have a great idea and even great data, but if you can’t make getting to that data easy for users, it’s not worth much. That’s where we were.
This is what users were greeted with when they went to our old Top Doctors feature.
We made three big decisions to clean this up:
- We spit Top Doctors and Top Dentists into separate features. This makes both features lighter and easier to use, and dentist and doctor data doesn’t overlap that much.
- We got rid of the hospitals column, as we did not have interesting data about individual hospitals (such as patient outcomes, types of surgery they do, etc.). That hospitals section is a major visual element, but it was just a giant distraction that frustrated users and caused them to flee.
- Most importantly, we decided that we had to show users doctors immediately when a user comes to our page. We show all 1,900+ top doctors when a user comes to our site, and then they can see how using our filters quickly whittles that data down.
When I started at Washingtonian earlier this year, one of my biggest pushes was to put user experience and usability at the core of all new Web products. We spent hours upon hours ironing out little usability details and QAing how the filters worked.
You can see which filters you have selected in the left-hand column (or at the top on mobile), but we also wanted to reinforce the idea of filters by putting a plain English sentence at the top of the results. Some users will quickly get the filtering concept, but others will benefit greatly from having their selection broken down into an English sentence.
We provide even more information on individual pages for doctors. These individual doctor listings provide the same functionality as our story pages. Doctors can submit to use videos, photo galleries, Q&As, interactive charts, etc.
We want to delight users, even when we’re not building something sexy. And I think we’ve achieved that with this new Top Doctors feature.
Building a quick way for users to find a doctor may not be as sexy as a building a bespoke story page like Snowfall, but it’s important to users.
Our work here isn’t done. We’ve launched this new feature, and we will continue to work on converting the rest of the site over to this new design. But now is a great time to start collecting data from users.
We are going to do a combination of collecting website data, usability tests with live users and surveys to improve our Web products. Top Doctors is a live feature that users can use, and it has our new menu system and design that the rest of washingtonian.com will be getting later this year. We can get feedback from users on how they like this new feature and design and use that feedback to help inform the rest of the redesign process.
If we waited to launch everything at once in an effort to surprise users, we wouldn’t be able to get feedback from users to help refine the rest of our redesign. It’s always good to get feedback from users, and it’s good to get that feedback earlier than later.
Also, our relaunched Top Doctors feature is users’ first glimpse into our new website launching later this year. We are switching to WordPress as content management system and are rolling out a new, responsive, mobile-first design that is clean and content-focused.
