How Doctors Can Win Patient Choice: Insights from Google Ventures' UX Expert Michael Margolis

Editor's Note:The author of this article, Michael Margolis, is a member of the Design Studio at Google Ventures and a partner at UXResearch. Margolis holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from Stanford University. Since 1990, he has been helping clients optimize product design by focusing on consumer experience. He previously worked at Walmart.com, where he led user experience research efforts that contributed to the design and development of numerous new online and cross-channel businesses. In 2006, Margolis joined Google as a user experience researcher, and in 2010, he moved to the Design Studio at Google Ventures. Drawing on his extensive experience in user experience research and internet product design, Margolis provides a detailed account in this article of how to design purchase funnels based on customer mindsets. VCBeat has compiled and translated this article, hoping it will offer some inspiration to readers.

If someone were to ask what buying coffee beans, investing, and choosing a doctor have in common, my answer would be that they are all different forms of shopping. In each shopping scenario, customers follow a predictable process to search for, evaluate, and narrow down their options. Understanding the customer’s shopping journey helps businesses optimize product design and information delivery channels, guiding consumers to choose your offerings over those of competitors; more importantly, it enables you to build products that fully meet consumer needs. At Google Ventures, the “purchase funnel” has become a secret weapon in our design work. We have applied this approach to a wide variety of startups, such as Blue Bottle Coffee, CircleUp, HomeAway, and One Medical Group. We begin by understanding consumers’ questions and the sequence in which they arise, then design corresponding messaging strategies and feature sets. In this article, I will use several examples to demonstrate how to leverage the purchase funnel to create designs tailored to your business.

From Walmart to Startups
I have long been dedicated to the study of shopping behavior. In fact, if you could travel back to 2002, you would find me surreptitiously navigating the women’s clothing section at Walmart, equipped with a digital camera, a clipboard, and a ballpoint pen. After the dot-com bubble burst, I joined Walmart.com as a researcher. Over the following years, my responsibilities centered on investigating how people shop for everything from electronics and apparel to furniture and engagement rings. It was during this period that I observed the ubiquity of the “purchase funnel.” Later, when I moved to Google Ventures, I consistently conducted rapid, ad-hoc research before initiating any design work. Time and again, I found that the most effective way to organize research insights was through the framework of the purchase funnel. Today, concepts such as the purchase funnel, customer journey, and decision tree are hardly novel. However, we have applied them to domains not typically associated with shopping, such as selecting a physician or choosing an API. Moreover, I have found that most purchase funnels are remarkably simple, usually comprising no more than five steps.

Basic Template for the Purchase Funnel
The specifics of various purchase funnels vary significantly, given the wide array of products and services currently available. Nevertheless, I have observed a common pattern. Reflect on your most recent purchasing decision, and the following may sound familiar:

1. Discovery: Collect Options and Establish Standards
When consumers first encounter your product, they are still simultaneously evaluating competitors’ offerings.

• “What do you have at home?”Unless consumers have extensive prior experience with your product, they must first familiarize themselves with the relevant landscape and learn the industry jargon. If your target audience consists of novices rather than experts, you may need to help them overcome this challenge first.




• “What are my requirements and standards?”Place important details in prominent positions to help consumers answer this question.




• “Which websites are trusted sources of information?”Understand how consumers perceive your product in comparison to competitors. Through simple and actionable research, observe differences in consumer behavior when browsing your website versus those of your competitors, and identify which types of images, audio, information, and visual design cues most effectively convey professionalism, reliability, and trust.

2. Candidate List: Selecting Options

Next, consumers will select a series of options that meet their initial screening criteria.

3. Deep Dive: An In-Depth Look at Each Product
Once consumers deem your product worthy of consideration, they will delve into the details.

• “Does this product or service meet my criteria?”Enable consumers to easily filter and compare options based on the criteria they value most. Your task is to identify which details can help them narrow down their choices and present these details in a readily accessible manner.

4. Verification: Refer to reviews of the product by other users
Before making a purchase decision, consumers seek out reviews from others to determine whether the product is worth buying.

• “How is it rated? What are my friends saying?”Search for reviews of your own products to see what information is available to consumers. Adding logos of existing clients, third-party reviews and ratings, as well as highlighting your competitive advantages in the market, can significantly enhance credibility. On iTunes, Rotten Tomatoes reviews (both positive and negative) are displayed on each movie’s page. For certain products, building an active community on product webpages or related forums (such as Reddit or Stack Overflow) enables potential customers to find allies.

5. Try: What is it actually like?
In many cases, consumers try out a product or service before making a purchase. Through such trials, they can determine whether the product is suitable for them or offers any benefits.

• “Is it truly compatible with my daily habits, lifestyle, and work style?”If it is inconvenient for consumers to try out the product, explore how to provide them with an accurate preview so they can understand how the product performs in real-life scenarios.

Below are several examples of different purchase funnels we have used. Although these are only excerpts, they convey the core concept. Click to visit the website and see how its design faithfully reflects consumers’ purchasing journey and helps potential customers quickly address their questions in the correct sequence.

How Patients Can Choose a Doctor
One Medical Group is a network connecting primary care physicians across the United States. They sought to expand their online presence to attract patient members looking for new doctors. To inspire our design, I studied how people search for and select their physicians.

1. Candidate List: Identifying Physicians Who Meet Basic Criteria
Patients first seek physicians who are accepting new patients and their health insurance, while also considering whether the providers’ locations are convenient for them to visit and whether the physicians meet their gender preferences.
2. Mining: More Detailed Criteria
Next, patients will carefully review the physicians’ resumes and compare the candidates on the shortlist. They may also add additional criteria, such as clinical experience, specialty, certifications, hospital affiliations, and social media presence.
3. Verification: Search online for reviews and ratings of the physician
Before scheduling an outpatient appointment, patients search for physician reviews on platforms such as Google and Yelp to check for any “red flags.”
4. Trial: Initial Appointment
If the initial outpatient visit is unsatisfactory, patients will promptly switch to another option.

The following illustrates the application of the purchase funnel in web design. As you can see, One Medical places specific criteria front and center, eliminating the need for patients to navigate across multiple pages to find the information they seek:

The Rigor and Seriousness of Coffee Drinkers in Purchasing Coffee Beans
Blue Bottle Coffee aims to enhance its online store to better align with the exceptional service offered at its physical cafes. The following purchase funnel illustrates how consumers make decisions when buying coffee beans online, highlighting that flavor is significantly more important than origin.

1. Finding: Is the seller authentic?
Buyers make quick judgments based on the website’s images, design, and content, resolving their own questions: “What do they sell?” and “Do they know coffee?”
2. Candidate List: Searching for Alternative Coffee Options
“Do they have the coffee I need?” “How does the coffee taste?”
3. Deep Dive: Narrowing Down to the Best Option
“Are these coffee beans suitable for my brewing and drinking methods?” “Other detailed information and descriptions regarding the coffee beans.”
4. Try: Place an order and try cooking at home
Of course, you cannot fully understand what coffee is really like from a webpage. If consumers try buying coffee beans, brew them at home, and enjoy the taste, they will purchase more again.
On its website, Blue Bottle prominently features descriptions of coffee flavors for consumers, using precise, detailed, and professional language.

How Authoritative Investors Approach Investment
CircleUp is a marketplace for investors, where they can discover fast-growing small consumer goods companies. For instance, national pharmacy chains in China can find health vitamin manufacturers on the platform and enter into distribution agreements with them. Faced with a long list of potential investment targets, investors seek to quickly identify companies worthy of further commitment. To enhance its services, CircleUp has designed the following funnel to align with the investors’ sourcing process.

1. Discovery: Are there any new companies in my areas of interest?
Most investors focus on a specific sector or specialty and frequently keep an eye on emerging talents in the industry.
2. Shortlist: Can the company’s products deliver an intuitive experience?
If investors cannot “understand” the product, they will not proceed to delve deeper into it.
3. Exploration: Is it worth my investment?
Gaining an in-depth understanding of a company is time-consuming and labor-intensive; therefore, investors typically ask themselves the following questions before proceeding:

• Is the company still raising funds?




• Is it raising capital through bonds or equity?




• Do I like its product samples?




• What are the criteria for growth/traction?




• What is its corporate structure?




• Is its management team capable?




• Who are the other investors?

Investors care most about the product itself, so CircleUp decided to place the product, rather than the company logo, in the most prominent position on the page. CircleUp also highlighted the three key facts that investors are most concerned about. The specific design is as follows:

As you can see, the purchase funnel is extremely useful during the design phase. Understanding consumers’ needs before they make a decision and designing accordingly enables them to have a satisfying shopping experience.

Tips for Building a Purchase Funnel
Most effective purchase funnels begin with consumer interviews. Don’t worry—conducting these interviews is neither difficult nor time-consuming. If you aim to create a purchase funnel for your product, I recommend adapting the following methods to suit your specific needs and conducting rapid, focused research.

Seeking individuals with recent "shopping" experiences
Identify consumers who have just completed “shopping” (i.e., made a purchase or a purchasing decision) in your field, or those who are preparing to do so.

Listen to Their Stories
Don’t rush to showcase your product to them. Instead, inquire about their goals, motivations, relevant past experiences, and the challenges they face. Encourage them to share the stories behind their purchasing journey. What are they seeking or trying to avoid? Based on their past experiences, what did they like or dislike? How do they identify viable options? Have they interacted with specific individuals, visited websites, or explored other alternatives? Were other people involved in the purchasing process? To help individuals reflect on their experiences, I would also ask the following questions:

• What information would you like to know before making this purchase?




• If a friend were to purchase such products or services, what advice would you give them?

Observe their shopping process
After listening to their stories, observe how respondents purchase products or services online while engaging in think-aloud protocols. When studying how people choose doctors, I would say, “Suppose you need to find a new primary care physician; what would you do?” I then observe how they search and which websites they visit. After allowing them to browse freely for a period, I typically present them with a series of competitor websites as well as the company’s own product website, which is of greatest concern to designers. During the respondents’ purchasing process, attempt to answer:

• What are the respondents’ reactions to and impressions of each option, and why?




• Which information is most critical? What information remains missing?




• What questions did the interviewee have?




• Which content, images, and information resonate most with respondents? Why?

Comparison and Contrast
After reviewing several different products, ask participants to compare and contrast them and describe the pros and cons of each. This type of feedback typically yields rich, summarized insights and offers valuable lessons for design teams. If you are studying a decision-making process that is prolonged and involves many considerations (such as enterprise software or engagement rings), it is highly useful to track consumers over time through methods like diaries, brief phone calls, and email surveys. However, intercept studies are more effective at quickly revealing common consumer steps, criteria, and pain points.

Draw a funnel sketch
Finally, and most importantly, you need to make your shopping funnel easily understandable for your team. Don’t worry; you don’t have to write a 500-page white paper that no one will read. Personally, I prefer to present it in sketch form using Keynote or PowerPoint, like this:

Yes, that’s more than enough! You can even do away with those troublesome speech bubbles.

From Funnel to Storyboard to Product
Once you have mapped out your purchase funnel, it is time to put it into practice. Structure your design and organize all information to address various consumer questions. The purchase funnel should spark a series of interactions between visitors and your product. Where do they come from? What comparisons are they making? How will they determine whether you offer what they are looking for? What are their primary and secondary information needs? And so on. At Google Ventures, we have found it highly effective to use storyboards to illustrate the end-to-end consumer journey, from product discovery to purchase. In summary, the purchase funnel is a powerful method for directly translating research insights into product strategy.

Compiled by Chen Xin | Edited by Mo Renying