Zillow: Strategic Vision

Enriched Home-shopping Experience

Home listings lacked a unified, emotionally resonant experience. As Zillow expanded into home transactions, they needed a scalable solution that would increase buyer confidence and differentiate home-shopping from competitors.

Role:Lead UX Designer

Scope:Research, Ideation, Prototyping

Time:12 weeks

Team:Technical Designer, Director

Ownership:

Led synthesis of qualitative insights into design principles and opportunity areas

Defined the leading interaction model of concept vision

Shaped and presented north-star narrative to C-level leadership

Impact:

Influenced Zillow’s future listing experience strategy and roadmaps; established a long-term interaction model used in future iterations

Strategic problem

As Zillow expanded into buying and selling homes (Zillow Offers), listing experiences needed to do more than show photos, they needed to reduce buyer uncertainty early in the funnel and create emotionally-resonant, scalable experiences that would increase demand and conversion.

Business goals

  • Increase buyer confidence and listing engagement

  • Create a scalable media orchestration system across listings

  • Provide a defensible competitive advantage for Zillow Offers

    • Project goals

    Presented with the opportunity to transform how homes are portrayed, we were tasked with creating an aspirational vision that would strategically align teams towards delivering an elevated home-buying experience.

    Business objectives & Approach

    The launch of Zillow Offers marked a strategic shift: introducing a new revenue stream by moving into the business of buying and selling homes.

    Beyond generating revenue, Zillow Offers faced a long-standing challenge: gaining greater control over the quality and consistency of how homes are captured for listings, from imagery to presentation.

    The opportunity in "rich media"

    Historically, Beth's home-shopping experience is sterile and tedious, and requires her to do "mental gymnastics". Through the power of computer vision, rich media, and AI, we saw a strong opportunity to explore how various rich media types are orchestrated in a more seamless, delightful experience for Beths.

    Defined rich media types:

    Photos

    Panos (3D tours)

    Floor plan

    Audio

    Light simulation

    Primary Persona

    Beth, The Explorer:

    Beth represents homeowners navigating in the early “dreaming” stages:

  • Browses homes to imagine lifestyle and fit
  • Attentive to details that convey "realism"
  • Needs orientation cues, realistic context, and quick ways to decide whether to visit in person

    • By being the least understood part of the user journey, we saw the opportunity to build engagement with users like Beth.

    Research & Insights

    Identifying opportunities for Beth

    To establish cross-team alignment, we spoke with program managers and researchers who spent significant time speaking with homeowners about their buying journey. We gathered insights that highlighted competitive advantages, gaps in the current experience, and missed opportunities.

    The goal is to try and save people time and only go visit the house that they want to go visit. The less surprise they feel, the better job we have done in making it a virtual open house.

    -Vice Chairman & Co-founder

    Understanding the floor plan is 100% what Beths want. Understanding virtual staging is maybe what Beths want...some Beths may not be able to afford renovations anyway.

    -VP of Shopping Experience

    We distilled these insights into actionable “How Might We” statements, each directly grounded in quotes to ensure a clear, traceable connection between user needs and design opportunities.

    How might rich media be accessed, organized, and navigated to best suit Beth's needs?

    Concept Ideation

    Crafting a scalable and aspirational vision

    We generated six directions and stack-ranked concepts based on their resonance with users. Prioritized approaches were also evaluate according to 1) scalability, and 2) alignment with business goals.

    Hypothesis Stack Rank: 1

    Beth will be delighted and more informed via a "seamless" rich media interaction model that tightly weaves all rich media types through a primary one.

    Hypothesis Stack Rank: 6

    A tool that allows Beth to envision different decor and furniture stylings is the most immersive and persuasive means of helping her visualize what it means to live in a home.

    Phase 1 : In week one, we focused on broad concept-generation to our top HMW statements. Our team drew inspiration from real-estate competitors and adjacent experiences, such as Matterhorn's 3D home and Airbnb.

    Phase 2 : In week 2, we translated "blue sky" ideas into static lo-fi mocks that mapped to hypothese. Through homeowner feedback, we stack ranked and prioritized the hypothese that best solved homeowners' early-funnel pain points.

    Phase 3 : In week 3, we synthesized our ideas into 3 distinct concepts, each representing a different interaction model and presentation of rich media.

    Prototyping

    Proving feasibility and scalability

    To demonstrate the scalability and feasibility of our proposed interaction model, our Technical Designer used publicly-available Google geo data to build a low-fidelity floor plan of an "example home". From the model, I designed the end-to-end experience and prototyped a working proof of concept.

    Feature highlight #1

    Interaction Model

    An interaction model that addresses:

    1) Beth's highest desire: to 'pivot' between media types while preserving spatial context and orientation

    2) Graceful degradation: fallback patterns for listings with partial media.

    Feature highlight #2

    Virtual Tour Mode

    Point-of-Interest-driven tours with agent-curated FAQ and contextual highlights. This was ranked #2 priority for homeowners.

    Feature highlight #3

    Sound Overlay

    Access audio recordings of different areas of the home to investigate its sound profile.

    Feature highlight #4

    Sunlight Overlay

    An accurate sun-path simulation to contexualize how the interior of a home receives natural light.

    Outcomes

    A vision that inspired the future of Zillow:

    A mobile-first demonstration of Beth's shopping experience, enriched by media at the relevant moments to instill confidence and delight.

    Our deliverable:

  • Established a clear north-star interaction model for Zillow’s listing experience.
  • Informed product roadmap and sparked cross-team investments in richer listing media.
  • Provided measurable hypotheses for A/B experiments (engagement, visit intent, conversion).

    • For more work samples or a quick chat, get in touch.

    nrzawadzki@gmail.com