Team:
Adhiraj Singh
Sarah Young
Sarah Young
Time:
4.5 weeks
Role:
Research
Strategy
Interaction & Visual design
Prototyping
Testing
Strategy
Interaction & Visual design
Prototyping
Testing
Tools:
Figma
Improve the co-shopping experience on Zillow
1. Image Tagging: A feature that allows asynchronous co-shopping partners to discuss a listing based on it's images.
2. In-App chat: A feature that maintains the context of the discussions surrounding a house, while centralizing and documenting all the relevant information and steps in the renting or buying process with the aim of bridging the divide between asynchronous searchers.
A feature that allows asynchronous co-shopping partners to leave comments on a potential house for one another.
A feature that maintains the context of the discussions surrounding a house, while centralizing and documenting all the relevant information and steps in the renting or buying process with the aim of bridging the divide between asynchronous searchers.
Click on the 'image tag' to view the comment that's left for you by your co-shopping partner.
Like it or comment for some longer feedback,
We leveraged the existing information architecture and added a 'messaging' button directly on to a listing in the Saved homes tab. By clicking on it, a user can go directly to the thread that documents all the information and key decision points for that listing.
The chat function seamlessly integrates with the image tags made by both parties.
Foundational Research
1:1 interviews to understand participants mindsets, attitudes, pain points of home renting/buying search process
Customer Journey Map
Evaluative Research
Usability testing to test our prototypes
Behavioral Diary Studies
We asked participants if they would be willing to share screenshots of instances in which they used tools in their housing search process to facilitate discussion and aid decision-making on listings. This included iMessage, Google sheets, Docs
We interviewed 5 users, aged 25-40, who had searched for a home with their partner in the last 6 months and closed on it through utilizing the Zillow platform.
“I took the lead. There was one day I saw three houses without her because her schedule just didn’t align.”
"The stress was in the time constraints. We had all these agents saying "You have to tell us."
We asked participants if they would be willing to share screenshots of instances in which they used tools in their housing search process to facilitate discussion and aid decision-making on listings. This included iMessage, Google sheets, Docs
We immediately noticed that users were using a variety of 3rd party tools to fill their needs of organizing, communicating and making decisions. This caused additional friction to an already stressful process.
iMessage:
Whatsup:
Google Sheets:
Google Docs:
To better understand the journey of our users, we created a journey map of them buying a house asyncronously.
This led us to the observation that a lot of the key decision making discussions were happening outside of the platform.
By reflecting on the primary and secondary research, we narrowed down on the following key insights.
Partners struggle to feel aligned with each other
In a typical co-searching partner dynamic, the supporting partner can feels left out at critical stages of the searching process, making it harder for them to align and move forward with a listing
There's no place for centralized discussions
Discussions about listings pre and post-showing are highly varied — from ranking, raw thoughts, and a pros and cons list — these have been forced out of the platform due to the current state’s inability to have thoughtful conversations about listings in-app
Images play a crucial part in decision-making
Users go back to the images from the listing and their own post-showing throughout the search and closing process but are not designed with ease of share-ability
How might we create a co-shopping experience on Zillow that is optimized for centralizing feedback with context to aid better decision-making?
We focused on two personas based on our primary and desk research.
One is of the more dominate searcher, i.e the primary searcher and the later is the supportive, secondary searcher.
We narrowed down our users needs in the following few actionable insights.
Creating the “real-time” feel with asynchronous feedback on listings so partners feel aligned
Reducing the need for 3rd party tools and centralize the discussion on Zillow between partners.
Leverage the image gallery feature as more prominent in-app. Incorporate personal media as part of listing
We made a few assumptions on how this feature would factor into Zillow's overall goal of providing a "seamless end to end experience."
Size of the opportunity
By utilizing the existing infrastructure of Zillow’s ‘Sharing’ feature as a design constraint, we innovated high impact, low effort solutions that enhance and expand upon the co-shopping user experience rather than disrupting it, making the adoption more seamless
The data generated is valuable
Having the qualitative data of what partners are discussing in the co-shopping process can help inform and improve other parts of the user experience [with proper privacy considerations in place)
KPI's
Increase in time in-app
Decrease time it takes to complete tasks in future proposed state than the current state
More efficient decision making that leads to faster turnaround in buying a house
I started by looking at analogous way in which people were sharing information around an image. Examples included Instagram, Facebook & Figma.
The data showed key milestones in the users searching process. This included conversing, sharing images of houses, calling the agent etc. The chat feature was optimized for interacting with different parts of Zillows information architecture that accommodated those behaviors but also with the new features we proposed. This feature further contextualized all these features into one convenient place for the personas.
We took these new proposed features and tested it on our participants.
We presented the prototypes, gave them a scenario and observed how they accomplished the tasks.
“This would have saved me having to search through all my texts to find the discussion thread about the house we were looking at.”
“The image tagging makes so much sense... it almost feels obvious.”
We reached out to Zillow to get some feedback on our proposal and pitched it to their Principle UX Researcher!
We got some amazing feedback that validated our process, potential solution space and research.
“I think what you have now is a super solid foundation.”
“…I do love the visual aspect, that’s something that’s really unique. This is in a similar vein, but a different direction to say okay we can overlay chat communication which is really cool, such nice explorations.”
Improve our MVP based on the feedback of our testing.
Present the IA and user flow.
Add a consideration for the agent.
Test this out on more users to further validate the concepts and narrow in on one of the concepts to action.
Measure the increase in data on the platform.
Measure the increase in efficiency in our proposed state versus the current state.
