The shopping shortcut: How to design for your customer’s mindset

An earlier version of this article was originally published at Fast Company.

What do buying coffee beans, making an investment, and choosing a doctor have in common? They’re all forms of shopping. In each case, customers follow predictable processes for finding, evaluating, and narrowing options. If you understand your customer’s shopping journey, you can design your product with the right messages in the right place. And that can guide customers towards selecting your product over competitors — and more importantly, guide you to building a product that’s a perfect fit. At Google Ventures, shopping funnels have become a secret weapon in our design work. We’ve used them with startups as varied as Blue Bottle Coffee, CircleUp, Homeaway, and One Medical Group. Once we know the questions that customers ask and in what order, we design the messaging and functionality to match. In this post, I’ll give you some examples and show you how to design with a shopping funnel that matches your business.

From Walmart to startups

I’ve been thinking about shopping for a long time. In fact, if we could travel back in time to 2002, you’d find me sneaking through the women’s apparel department at a Walmart carrying a digital camera, clipboard, and ballpoint pen. See, right after the dotcom bust, I took a job as a researcher at Walmart.com. Over the next several years, it was my responsibility to study how people shopped for everything from electronics to apparel, from furniture to engagement rings… you name it. I began to see shopping funnels everywhere. These days at Google Ventures, I often conduct research sprints prior to our design sprints. It turns out that the most efficient and effective way to organize the results is often in the form of a shopping funnel. Now, purchase funnels, customer journeys, and decision trees aren’t new ideas. But we use them for things that people don’t usually think of as shopping (such as finding a physician or choosing an API). And I’ve found that most shopping funnels are very simple—often no more than five steps.

The basic shopping funnel template

The details of shopping funnels vary considerably — after all, there are a lot of products and services available these days. However, I’ve noticed a general pattern, and it goes something like this (if you think back to your last big shopping decision, this may sound familiar):

1. Discover: Gather options and establish criteria

Customers first encounter your product when they’re still looking at competitors.

• “What’s available?” Unless they have a lot of previous experience with products like yours, customers first have to get the lay of the land and learn the lingo. And if you’re targeting newbies rather than experts, you may need to help them get over that hump.
• “What are my requirements and criteria?” Help customers answer this question by bringing important details to the forefront.
• “What sites are credible sources for information?” Know how your customers perceive your product compared to your competitors. Watch your customers look at your and their sites by doing quick and dirty user research. For your domain, figure out what kinds of images, tone, messaging, and visual design signal the appropriate level of expertise, reliability, and trust.

2. Short list: Select candidates

Next, customers choose a set of options that meet their initial screening.

3. Dig In: Drill into each product

Once customers consider your product worthy of consideration, they’ll drill into the details.

• “Does the product or service meet my criteria?” Make it easy for customers to filter and compare options based on the criteria that matter most to them. Your job is to figure out which details help them narrow their options — then make those details dead simple to find.

4. Validate: What are people saying?

When customers are close to a purchase decision, they look for outside confirmation or red flags.

• “What do the reviewers say? What do my friends say?” Search for reviews of your own product to see what your customers are seeing. Adding customers’ logos or third-party reviews, ratings, and testimonials to your own marketing — can be a huge credibility boost. iTunes shows Rotten Tomatoes reviews (good or bad) right on each movie page. For some products, fostering an active community on your site or on related forums (such as Reddit, or Stack Overflow) reassures potential customers that they’ll be in good company.

5. Try: What’s it really like?

In many instances, customers try a product or service before they really commit. By kicking the tires, they can decide whether it makes sense for them — and whether it’s any good.

• “Practically, does it fit my habits, lifestyle, or the way I do my work?” If it’s not feasible for your customers to try it themselves, explore ways to give them an accurate preview of how it looks and works in real life.

Here are four very different examples of shopping funnels we’ve used (simplified and redacted but you’ll get the idea). Click through to the launched web site to see how the designs mirror their customers’ shopping funnels, helping prospective customers answer their questions quickly — and in the right order.

How patients shop for doctors

One Medical Group is a network of primary care doctors’ offices in several cities across the US. They wanted to sign up more patients who came to their web site looking for new doctors. To inform our design sprint, I studied how people find and choose their physicians.

Here’s how the shopping funnel was applied to the design. As you can see, One Medical put the detailed criteria front and center, so patients wouldn’t have to dig across multiple pages:

How serious coffee drinkers shop for beans

Blue Bottle Coffee wanted to improve their online store and make it better match the excellent hospitality of their cafes. This shopping funnel shows how a customer makes online coffee bean purchase decisions — and highlights the importance of taste over origin.

On their website, Blue Bottle now describes the coffee’s taste upfront — in language that conveys their nuanced expertise:

How accredited investors shop for investments

CircleUp is a marketplace where investors can find small, fast-growing consumer goods companies (think healthy vitamin makers who just scored a distribution deal with a national drugstore chain). Faced with a long list of potential investments, those investors want to quickly identify the companies that merit further diligence. As CircleUp built their service, they used this funnel to match their design to the investors’ shopping process.

Because the investors care so much about the product itself, CircleUp decided to make product photos the most prominent feature of their browse page — instead of the companies’ logos. And they surfaced three key facts that investors might care most about on each company. Here’s the design:

As you can see, shopping funnels turn out to be super useful for the design phase. Knowing what people are looking for as they make decisions and designing to match is a recipe for a happy customer.

Research tips for making your own shopping funnel

Most good shopping funnels start with customer interviews. Don’t worry — running interviews isn’t that hard and it doesn’t have to take a long time. If you’d like to create a shopping funnel for your product, I recommend using our Google Ventures recipe for a four-day research sprint – with a few tweaks.

Find people with recent “shopping” experience

Look for customers who have recently finished “shopping” (in other words, made a purchase or decision) in your category, or those who are in the midst of it.

Listen to their stories

Before you show them your own product, take a step back. Ask about their goals, motivations, relevant past experiences, and challenges. Get them to tell you the story of their shopping process. What are they looking for, or trying to avoid? What did they like and dislike about past experiences? How did they figure out what’s available? Did they talk to particular people, visit web sites, try alternatives? Were other people involved in the process? To help people reflect on their experiences, I also like to ask questions like:

• What do you wish you’d known before you started shopping for this?
• What advice would you give to a friend who’s beginning to shop for this service?

Watch them shop

After you’ve heard their stories, watch participants shop online for the service (while thinking aloud). When studying how people shop for physicians, I just said, “Let’s pretend you need to find a new primary care physician. What would you do?” Then watch how they search and where they go online. After I let them roam freely for a while, I’ll usually show them a set of competitors’ sites that the team is most interested in (you can think of these as free prototypes) and — of course — the company’s own product. During this shop-along, try to learn:

• What are their reactions and impressions of each option? Why?
• What information is most important? What’s missing?
• What questions do they have?
• What content, imagery, and messaging resonate most? Why?

Compare and contrast

After looking at several products, ask your participant to compare and contrast them, describing the pros and cons of each. This debrief is usually a very rich summary conversation that highlights key lessons for the team. When you’re studying a longer, high-consideration decision process (like enterprise software or engagement rings), it can be valuable to track shoppers over time with diaries, brief phone calls, email questionnaires, etc. But scrappy research sprints are surprisingly effective at quickly revealing patterns in your customers’ common steps, criteria, and questions.

Sketch your funnel

Last but certainly not least, you’ll need to make your shopping funnel something that’s easy for your own team to understand. Don’t worry — there’s no need to write a 500 page whitepaper that nobody’s going to read. I like to sketch a simple diagram in Keynote or PowerPoint, or even on a whiteboard, like this:

Really, that’s all it takes! You can even get away with skipping the bubble letters.

From funnel to storyboard to product

After you’ve outlined your shopping funnel, it’s time to put it to work. Structure your design and organize your information to match the questions customers will naturally have. Your shopping funnel should evoke a story of how visitors will interact with your product. Where are they coming from? What comparisons are they making? How will they judge whether you have what they want? What info will they look for first? Second? And so on. At Google Ventures, we find it useful to sketch a storyboard to illustrate the end-to-end customer story — all the way from discovering the product to conversion (for more details about story-based design, see this excellent post by Braden Kowitz). It’s a great way to translate the learnings from your research directly into your product strategy. Have you used shopping funnels for product design? I’d love to hear about it. Tweet us at @GVDesignTeam or @mmargolis.