Selling a home to a company is a new and confusing experience. American real estate is shifting, with more opportunities to buy and sell homes online. Home sellers benefit from selling without open houses, negotiating, or waiting for a buyer to secure financing. Zillow can buy a home and have it off a seller’s hands in a week. It streamlines the selling journey like never before. To communicate clearly and keep the process transparent, Zillow sought to provide a status/dashboard experience that keeps home sellers informed.

My role

When I joined the team, the first version of the selling dashboard had been live for almost a year, with efforts underway to expand the service to more states. The research team identified a major need to revisit the dashboard experience through a redesign. I teamed up with other designers to examine the entire user journey and find key opportunities for improvement.

4 Designers

5 Engineers

1 PM

Deliverables:

1. Design sprint
2. Wireframes
3. Re-design
4. New UI components
5. User journey
6. iOS and Android designs

I spent the first month examining the research to understand the targeted customer segment. I also took time to speak with business representatives to understand the nature of the service. Zillow offers strives to provide a service that takes care of repairs, re-selling, closing, and finances. From a user standpoint, all you have to do is agree to a selling price and sign papers. The research did work to understand the motivations behind the customers who show interest in the service.

Business

Unlike flipping homes, Zillow is not transforming homes to sell at a much higher price. Zillow is instead looking to buy homes from sellers, make repairs, then use their own resources like agents and market analysis to re-sell the home fast.

What about the cost? A typical real estate agent may charge a commission fee of 5% to 6% of the purchase price, whereas Zillow commands 6% to 9% Fortunately, this fee includes the cost of any repairs and closing costs. At the end of the day, the seller may see a difference of 1-2% more from selling traditionally. The benefit in the service is the quick turnaround, no out-of-pocket costs or relationships needed with a buyer's agent.

Our customer segment are homeowners looking to sell within a 3-5 month timeline. Users may become aware of Zillow offers and competitors through marketing, searching for homes online or from word of mouth. Research has outlined 3 primary customer motivations:

Make it Convenient

These sellers wish to avoid showings, repairs and preparing homes for listings on the open market.

Make it Certain

These sellers value a certain sale (no consent negotiation) and having control on closing date over maximizing  price.

Make it Competitive

These sellers wish for an offer within the expectation of their home value and struggle to compromise. While Zillow's offers may not seem competitive, they're within 5% of the sales price 90% of the time. Based on our internal research, the main issue is around sellers' perception of home value. Unfortunately, home value is based on market trends of recently sold homes. Home facts that play the biggest role are sq footage, and a number of beds and baths, but not things like year built or hardwood floor. In addition, Susan may realize she is not interested in the value prop of connivance, speed, certainty if it means losing a 1,000-3,000k.

After looking into the customer segment, I took a thorough analysis of conversion rates to see what the experience suggested or where it fell short. I soon realized there was a major dropout rate for most customers. I worked with research to illustrate the customer journey to identify where customers were dropping out and piece together the issues at hand.

The most significant point of drop off is at the initial offer where Susan is presented with the market value of the home which is based on similar homes recently sold. This is a high, intense moment where a customer is told the value of the home they have been living in for x number of years. It can be emotionally tough to hear it's any less than the perceived value. To make matters more challenging Zillow has made its mark on predicting home value with the Zestimate, an algorithm that uses recently sold prices in the area to calculate an average home price in the area. A Zestimate is a number based prediction that can not take in facts, features, or condition of a home. All is to say a Zestimate may differ from a precise market value which can change month to month.

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The most significant point of drop off is at the initial offer where Susan is presented with the market value of the home which is based on similar homes recently sold. This is a high, intense moment where a customer is told the value of the home they have been living in for x number of years. It can be emotionally tough to hear it's any less than the perceived value. To make matters more challenging Zillow has made its mark on predicting home value with the Zestimate, an algorithm that uses recently sold prices in the area to calculate an average home price in the area. A Zestimate is a number based prediction that can not take in facts, features, or condition of a home. All is to say a Zestimate may differ from a precise market value which can change month to month.

The MVP product

After looking at the customer journey and potential challenges I also looked to the current dashboard experience customers had as a reference point. Considering we were undergoing a re design there was opportunity to understand why in relationship to the user interface.

The goal of the dashboard: is keep customers informed and aware of the home selling process. While the MVP provided an overall view of the process, how the process was positioned seemed confusing, language like "Requested offer" and "Advisor call" has no real meaning or provides any net new information. The image below provide a further breakdown of the critique.

To kick off the re-design we got everyone involved in a design sprint. The goal of the sprint was to look at the research, customer journey to best understand the customer pain-points when selling their home to Zillow. Then we started brainstorming solutions for those pain points. We ran different activities to get people thinking from a customer perceptive while having product and engineers help determine constraints.

Considerations moving forward

After the sprint we complied concepts and themes that came out of our collective thinking.

Solutions to consider moving forward:

• Offer more tools and information to empower Susan when selling
• Reposition the title of each step in selling process to give better context to the selling/buying relationship with Zillow
• Provide a more transparent explanation for how home value is calculated also in relationship to the Zestimate
• Work with the support team to create more opportunities of transparency

Design

The strategic plan for design was accomplished in the design sprint and further followup. Now was the time to create a flexible layout, an interactive indicator, new content strategy, and app design in extension to the web. In collaborating with other designers we co-designed the indicator and content, then I focused on the market value and evaluation page and translating the entire dashboard in ios & Android.

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