Zillow Group
2019 - 2023
I joined Zillow’s UX research team in 2019 during a time of fast growth and innovation. I began focusing on the home shopper experience, conducting field visits and on-site surveys, before switching focus full time to home touring. As the pandemic lockdown began, virtual tours became essential, eventually leading to my role as the subject matter expert in real estate photography research.
Home Shopping - Touring
A major milestone in the home shopping journey is the decision to tour a home. Each home shopper has unique needs and desires, and touring a home is often one of the final steps before placing an offer.
Understanding how the decision to tour homes is made and what makes a home tour successful would help Zillow to improve the end-to-end shopping experience.
Originally a small research task to evaluate post-tour interaction designs, I worked with multiple stakeholders across both the shopper and agent teams to re-craft the study scope and research questions.
I decided a diary study for home shoppers actively engaged in touring homes would be the most prudent method, and I began to learn how to use Dscout.I was surprised by the openness of participants who often showed huge emotional swings in their short video diaries.
Using the findings from the diary study and previous research on experience outcomes, I was able to derive a strong model that can predict tour outcomes. More importantly, I discovered the shopper’s definition of a successful tour was not tied to making an offer on the home.
ShowingTime+ Home Details Page
In summer of 2022, after Zillow acquired the home tour scheduling company ShowingTime, the newly formed team began work on a new home detail page that would emphasize high quality visuals and interactive media. Never before in Zillow’s history had the concept of a premium home detail page been explored, and there were many questions about the design and how home shoppers would react to multiple page layouts during their search.
I worked with the principal designer on several rounds of foundational research with high fidelity interactive prototypes to discover how shopper’s mental models would adjust to including a premium detail page. This premium detail page was also an opportunity to explore how to better fulfill shopper’s goals without legacy baggage.
I conducted multiple rounds of usability testing, refining designs and gaining evidence that the new design features held exceptional value to shoppers. The resulting design and research findings eventually led to plans to alter the existing home detail pages in order to improve the home shopping experience across Zillow as a whole.
Real Estate Photography & Zillow 3D Home
Zillow 3D Home is an app for real estate photographers created originally as a hack-week project in 2018. Real estate photographers could use the app and supported panorama cameras to create 3D walkthroughs of homes.
During pandemic lockdowns, virtual tours of homes became a staple for real estate listings. The Rich Media Experience (RMX) team, seeing opportunity, asked for design and research help to improve the app’s capture experience and explore new functionality.
I began conducting formative research, shadowing photographers in the field, and created Experience Outcomes (XOs) tied to the photographer persona, Phil. I worked with the design team to hold a week-long design sprint with the RMX team creating multiple concepts to alleviate common usability and experience issues. I then conducted concept tests and participatory design sessions.
Over two years, the app design had radically improved, reducing capture time to less than a fifth of Zillows’ competitors’ and introducing a multitude of new features and quality of life changes.
By early 2021, Zillow began to offer the creation of floor plans using the Zillow 3D Home app. I acted as lead researcher redesigning the internal floor plan creation tools, drastically reducing overhead costs and leading to major investments from Zillow leadership.
Combining research efforts across internal facing, photographer facing, and customer facing experiences enabled me to identify opportunities to improve the entire Zillow 3D Home ecosystem.
Home Shopping Visual Media - Measures of Success
In 2021, I was approached by the lead program manager of the Rich Media org to answer the following simple question: “How should we measure the success of rich media?”. The goal was to rethink the OKRs attached to rich media as leadership began to feel the current set were poor indicators of impact to the overall experience.
I conducted a large generative study to understand how home buyers define success for visual media as well as an extensive literature review of over two dozen studies across the previous five years.
To answer the question, I created a two-part report. The first defined success for buyers in terms of informational needs, and mapped those needs to specific shopping behaviors and media types. The second argued for new qualitative approaches to experiential OKRs to evaluate how successful UX design and UX research efforts have been throughout a project.
The results of these reports laid the foundation for how to plan home shopper experience projects and how to measure their results. Additionally, the reports provided strong evidence that home shoppers’ position in the buying funnel can be identified through on-site behavior.
