We conclude our study of phone numbers on the Internet by answering the question, “How long does it take to find the phone number for my Doctor?”

The search for Dr Moness, a Kaiser doctor in the Folsom, CA facility was not an easy task.  In fact, this search was more difficult than my other search tests.

As a Kaiser patient, I know that it is not possible to call a Kaiser doctor directly.  Instead, you have to call the “adult medicine advice” number for your home facility.  I also recall a separate Kaiser web site specifically for California patients.  Based on this knowledge, I began my search by typing “Kaiser CA” in the Google search box.  I got the following results.

My search results for Kaiser CA

Clicking the first result brought me to kaiserpermanente.org.  As you can see from the following screenprint, this site is for prospective members.  Nowhere on the page is there a link for current members. This is wild.  Why would the main page of the website look like an ad?  Why is it not a landing page for every audience?

The website for prospective members only

I went back to my search results.  I avoided clicking the ”Web site map” link.  This link would have brought me to the member site, but as a user I have found site maps to be unpredictable, so I opted not to click on it.  I explored a bit further, but finally clicked on it because nothing else seemed to work.  That brought me to this page. 

A screenprint of the member site

Ah!  No we’re on to something.   I clicked “Members Home”, but it turns out that I was already on members home (why did it give me a link to a page that I was already on?).  OK.  I’ll keep trying.  I finally found a link called “Medical Staff Directory” under the “Locate our services” link.  This was an odd label, but it seemed to work.  It  brought me to a search lookup page.  I entered “Moness” in the search box and it brought me to this page.  Yes!  Was this it?  I can’t believe it.  It gave an address, but no phone number.

The first page about Dr Moness, but still no phone number.

I clicked the ”Visit my home page”  link.  Finially, a nice and helpful page about Dr Moness–complete with the advice phone number.  Whew!

Yet another page for Dr Moness--complete with a phone number.

Lessons Learned

- Consider all the needs of all users and plan your design around those needs.  This is why the persona or scenario design approach is so useful.  A scenario of “A current patient wants to easily locate the phone number for the Adult Medicine advice number for the Folsom, CA facility” would have uncovered the design flaws that I experienced.

- Make sure your search results for a key homepage is not labeled “Site Map”. 

- Don’t confuse your users by having different pages that provide the same information.  For example, why were two Dr Moness pages and why did I have to go to the second page to get the phone number?

Note:  To Kaiser’s credit, had I typed “Moness Kaiser Folsom” in the Google search box, I could have found the phone number in 2 clicks.