What if I was: Healthline

Alex Dou
Alex Dou
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

Healthline.com was founded in 2005 to 1) assemble the most comprehensive source of healthcare information on chronic conditions such as COPD, Crohn’s, or Cancer; and 2) provide support for people suffering from these conditions with communities.

Their content is reviewed by many doctors and nurses, and licensed dietitians and nutritionists write for their Healthline Nutrition blog.

There was a job posting for Product at Healthline recently, and I wanted to take some time to examine the company and see what they might be working on.

The Business Model

Healthline is ad-supported, meaning that they write exhaustively-researched and vetted articles on health, which draws in eyes, which nets them ad money.

Ads on IBS article: Entyvio is used in the treatment of ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease

As best I can tell, these are Doubleclick ads, so they’re being matched to the audience algorithmically. If a reader comes to the site, reads through this IBS article, and then clicks through the Entyvio ad, Healthline gets a cut.

Because of this, main levers for the business are going to be arranged in a funnel similar to the below:

So let’s say that Healthline can post 10 articles per week, and put in 4 ad groups per article (in the example case, let’s take the banner and side Entyvio ads as one ad group).

There are some Sessions that come from Organic/Email, and one would hope some more Sessions that come from further sharing via FB/Twitter.

From there, you enter the conversion funnel, which takes you through the funnel if a user Read > Clicked > Converted. In the end, with these numbers, it looks grim.

The Teardown

In clicking around the site, there are a couple of issues:

  1. Content is really hard to read (here’s that example IBS page again)
  • Lots of space is lost to ads and the nav bar at the top, squashing real estate
  • No imagery makes the words all blend together (here’s a link to a full-length screenshot of the page)
  • There are ads littered all over the page, which makes me distrust the site
  • Last updated and medically reviewed a year ago (the Crohn’s article was last updated 2 years ago)
Science changes fast
  • Suggested articles are a little loose in terms of similarity/usability

2. Search brings up ad content before Healthline content

3. Overall, the site seems bloated

Healthline, in its own words, wants “to be your most trusted ally in your pursuit of health and well-being.” However, with all of the extra lifestyle articles, it feels more like Livestrong or maybe even a Healthy-ish (without the benefit of tight editorial and cool web design).

The Strategic Theme

One of the jobs of the PM is to lay down the vision, to blend the business and user needs and figure out a feature map to get there. The way I was trained to do this was to write down Big Strategic Themes™. These are written statements not unlike company values that serve to remind us what we’re working toward every day.

For Healthline, I can think of one:

  1. Know your shit, and communicate it well

Look, having your body not work the way you’ve become used to it working sucks. It’s scary — even that word, “scary”, doesn’t really capture it: it’s terrifying, mortifying, upending, when you can’t really trust your body anymore.

We want to be the most exhaustively researched, authoritative source of medical information in the world. We’re not going to be WebMD, where every symptom is a scavenger hunt that ends in cancer. We have doctors, nurses, dietitians, and nutritionists on staff to review and vet every word we put out there because our users depend on it to make the most informed decision they can about their health.

Because the science of health is always changing (is fat good for me now yet?), we need to help our users understand the current state of our understanding of various conditions. For things that we are 100% confident about, we need to cite the research that makes us 100% sure. For things that we are 50% confident about, we need to give those reasons, and let our users fold that into their own understanding of their illness. For things that we are 0% confident about, well, we had better never let it get to published.

This is important because:

  • If our users don’t feel like they can trust us, then we’ve lost. Nobody’s going to read — much less share — an article that they don’t trust
  • If we blitz our users with too much information, the utility ceases to exist. Their eyes glaze over like it’s Organic Chem all over again
  • By investing in an infrastructure that focuses on scientific process, we’re building something new and unique that cannot easily be replicated by competitors

Overall, there are a couple of things that Healthline can work on. There’s a readability standpoint, but also a deeper, strategic aspect that I think they’re missing. But if they can shore those up, I think they stand to make a great impact to people who need help.

Alex Dou

Written by

Alex Dou

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