Home shopping redefined

Challenge

Despite its position as the category leader with over 200 million visitors a month - lackluster visitor retention and the growth of competitors indicated vulnerability to disruption.

Strategy

Infuse relevance, simplicity, and delight into the entire buying process by exceeding user expectations while overcoming organizational silos and experience debt.

Results

Aligned product roadmaps company-wide, transformed the product ethos to focus on experience quality, and an updated design system. Launched several improvements which increased activation engagement by 10% within the first 6 months of launch.

Case study ⤑
Product Vision: Zillow redesign
Role: Product Vision, Product Strategy, Facilitation
Team: 8 UXDs, 1 UX Researcher (UXR), 7 PMs, 4 Execs
Time: 6 week vision, 12 months to ship; 2018

Inspire bigger thinking

Challenge

As a #movefast company, we’d fallen into the trap of micro-optimizing successful features and hadn’t been seizing the opportunity to transform home buying.

Strategy

Inspire teams to address underserved consumer pain points by co-creating an aspirational buyer experience set in the near future that leveraged emerging technologies.

Results

Clarity and alignment on the long term product vision were achieved by co-authoring the narrative with leadership. Near term priorities were re-evaluated by PMs through involvement in generative ideation. The vision and the seeds it planted continue to shape product roadmaps.

Product Vision: 5 year buyer vision
Role: Buyer Design Lead, Facilitation, Collaborator
Team: 3 UXDs, 2 Visual Designers, 1 UXR
Time: ~3 month vision, 2 months for artifacts; 2016
Exerpt from the home-buyer product vision.
UX2020: 5 year buyer vision
Exerpt from the home-buyer product vision.
Define effort goals and scope, compile user insights, and identify collaborators.
PHASE ONE: Define
Define effort goals and scope, compile customer insights, and identify collaborators.
Leverage cross-discipline creativity through exec interviews, design studios, or brainstorms.
PHASE TWO: Ideate
Leverage cross-discipline creativity through exec interviews, design studios, and brainstorms - grounded in customer insights.
Affinitize the ideas to the user journey and prioritize against user insights.
PHASE THREE: Synthesize
Affinitize the ideas to the customer journey and prioritize them against customer insights.
Craft a relatable, compelling narrative into sharable artifacts.
PHASE FOUR: Articulate
Craft a relatable, compelling narrative
into shareable artifacts.
Broadcast it at all hands, offsites, and make it internally accessible to all.
PHASE FIVE: Socialize
Broadcast it at all-hands, offsites, and make it internally accessible to all.
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Raising the bar in the cloud

Challenge

AWS is facing growing competition from easier to use alternatives. It had to raise the experience bar on its increasingly complex and fragmented 15 year old ecosystem, or lose its market leading position and billions in revenue.

Strategy

Improve product quality across disciplines by establishing a rigorous, trusted, and collaborative human-centered design practice amidst an entrenched technology centric culture where only design-as-a-service had existed before.

Results

Design funding and influence increased across the 3 services I directly supported, with designers moving from a service department function to an equal partner role - actively participating in early product planning, defining experience KPIs, creating AB testing guidelines, and deploying mixed method research techniques.

Role: Design Manager
Team: 9 UX Designers (UXD), Seattle and San Jose
Products: Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, AWS RoboMaker
Time: 1.5 years, 2019 - 2021
EXPERIENCE IS THE DIFFERENTIATOR
Despite accelerating demand for cloud solutions and exponential feature delivery, competitors are gaining market share while the established market leader remains flat.
QUALITY BAR: Ability to influence
In order to drastically improve the quality bar, design needed to move from a service role with limited influence over what was being built, to an equal partner, able to leverage evidence backed design methodologies throughout the product development process.
SCOPE OF ROLE
I led a team of 9 designers that directly supported 3 services (S3, Kinesis, RoboMaker) which fell into 3 distinct segments (storage, analytics, robotics) and whose customers included large brands such as Netflix, NASDAQ, Disney, and iRobot.
NEW PRODUCT: S3 Storage Lens
Since launch S3 customers could store and access unlimited data but had limited visibility into their usage, often leading to billing suprises. With Storage Lens they can now optimize performance and costs through customizable reports and get tailored recommendations based on their storage utilization.
NEW PRODUCT: RoboMaker Worldforge
Prior to Worldforge, robotics developers would have to code, deploy, and train their AI models in the real world, costing countless hours per iteration. Now they can make improvements more quickly by training their models on realistic, customizable physical world simulations at scale.
Redesign
Legacy
REDESIGN: S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 has been the go-to storage solution for the cloud since 2006. The revised Buckets list kept task efficiency at the forefront while also laying a foundation for information transparency and A/B testing into additional improvements.
LEGACY: S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Millions of monthly users had learned to use and rely on the legacy system over the years, despite fundamental usability issues with the design system and a need for improved information transparency.
Redesign
Legacy
REDESIGN: Kinesis Data Firehose
The new single step “Create delivery stream” flow increased task success and time to completion through smart defaults and progressive disclosure, which was informed by qualitative and quantitative customer research.
LEGACY: Kinesis Data Firehose
The legacy five step flow hadn’t been optimized for distinct but common use cases and as result, included many irrelevent fields and unnecessary steps every time a customer tried to use it for their specific application.
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Housing in a New York minute

  • Still image of the Listing Detail screen photo gallery. Transition into the the Listing Detail screen photo gallery triggered by a swipe or tap on the image.
  • Still image of List View for the Search Experience that allows shoppers to see a map by swiping right on the list item. Quick location lookup interaction available from List View in the Search Experience by swiping right or tapping the map marker icon on each row.
  • Still image of the Listing Detail screen with the map entrypoint above the fold. Transition into and out of the Listing Detail Map experience from the Listing Detail screen from the map entrypoint above the fold.
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Challenge

Zillow acquired StreetEasy because of its dominance in the NYC real estate market but engagement with their mobile app wasn’t keeping up with mobile growth trends.

Strategy

The app needed a complete overhaul to better serve the needs of NYC shoppers trying to navigate the unique intricacies of their market. The new design emphasized simplicity, speed, and mobility.

Results

Upon launch the app earned a 4.7 app store rating and drove a 50% increase in property views, a 170% increase in leads, and a 2015 webby award.

iOS Redesign: StreetEasy mobile app
Role: Sole Designer
Time: 2.5 months, 2014

Making financing ubiquitous

Challenge

Zillow launched its mortgage marketplace in 2008 but struggled to gain traction with consumers because they often weren’t on the Zillow website when they were making their financing decisions.

Strategy

Introduce home-buyers to financing tools at the right time and place in their journey. In 2011 adoption of mobile hadn’t overtaken desktop but our mobile scenarios were strong. We launched standalone iOS and Android apps while architecting them for easy integration into the existing Real Estate search apps.

Results

By 2013 consumers had initiated over 20 million loan requests, up 70% from the previous year and mortgage revenue had doubled from $10M to $20M.

Product Strategy: Zillow Mortgage Apps
Role: Sole Designer
Time: 2011 - 2013
Mortgage native iOS apps from 2013. Similar designs were created for the Android operating system.