Zillow Home Buyer’s Guide
Designing an educational tool for first-time homebuyers
Background
Zillow is the leading online real estate and rental marketplace. They serve the full lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling, and more.
The Opportunity
Zillow would like to engage and educate potential first-time millennial home buyers on everything they need to know about making the purchase to entice them to take advantage of record-low mortgage rates. Additionally, they want to provide users with ways to be better informed so that they will feel equipped and knowledgeable about the home purchasing process.
My Role
User Research | UX Writing | Ideation
Timeline
2 Weeks | August 2020
Team
Alexandra Koeck-Schultz | Sydney Lyckman | Lucas Bateman
The Process
Discover
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
Survey
Affinity Mapping
Define
Persona
User Journey Maps
Problem Statement
Solution Statement
Design
Design Studio
Sketching
Lo-Fidelity Prototype
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Usability Testing
Deliver
Present to Stakeholders
Next Steps
Discover
Who is the Competition?
We started our research by conducting a competitive and comparative analysis, hoping to gain insights into how online rental marketplaces currently educate their users.
Key Insights:
We found that most companies, including Zillow, have resources like articles or blogs, but no comprehensive educational tool for first-time home-buyers. Users currently have to do a lot of extensive research outside of any online rental marketplace.
Hypothesis
There are so many steps within the home buying process, it’s inevitable that people need to resort to many sources in order to understand and have a grasp of the process in its entirety. Most millennials are only somewhat knowledgeable about the process and would benefit from a comprehensive resource.
Learning About Our Users
We created a brief survey to get a sense for how comfortable our millennials feel about the home buying process, where they start their search, and what they’d really like to gain knowledge on.
Key Insights from Survey
Most millennials use their phones when starting the home searching process
Most millennials first turn to online rental marketplaces before any other resource, but only for a tiny part of the process
Most millennials want to primarily learn more about the home buying process in its entirety
Most people only feel somewhat knowledgeable about the home buying process
User Interviews
We then interviewed two millennial home-renters, two experienced home buyers, and two millennial home buyers to learn about their needs, goals, and frustrations before and during the process.
Define
Who is the Millennial Home Buyer?
Through the process of affinity mapping, we were ultimately able to synthesize our millennial renters hesitations with the insights of our experienced buyers into the following statements.
Our user is:
Financially conscious
Intimidated by buying … it’s a big deal!
Overwhelmed by extensive processes
Frustrated by how many steps are involved in the home buying process
They want to feel informed (on everything from costs to legal rights) and prepared
Appreciative of input from professionals and family/friends
Meet Kate!
To fully understand these synthesized statements and further empathize with the user, we created a persona. Kate is a fictionalized character created to represent the millennial home buyer, with all of her details and facts pulled directly from our research. We used Kate to help formulate our problem statement and inform our design decisions.
Zillow My Guide Persona
Problem
Kate needs a trustworthy learning resource to inform the purchase of her first home because she wants to make sure she made the right decision and needs to feel confident in her purchase.
Solution
We will develop a streamlined, educational tool for Zillow to guide and assist first-time homebuyers throughout every stage of the home buying process so that they can feel confident and informed about their purchase
How might we…
Make learning about the home buying process engaging and educational for Kate?
Best provide Kate with the financial resources to make informed choices?
Help Kate feel confident about purchasing her first home?
Design
Considering the business goals as well as the needs of our user, Kate, we determined the following design goals:
Incorporate educational tool into existing Zillow app
Streamline existing Zillow educational resources into one source
Provide context to existing Zillow financial tools
Make the process more accessible
Continue to build a sense of trust and expertise
What does a successful educational tool look like?
As we continued to realize how massive the home buying process truly is, we wanted to examine how other companies are successfully tackling comprehensive educational learning from the comfort of a phone.
To the Drawing Board
With these applications in mind, we held a design studio to generate possible design solutions and features for our mobile application.
We quickly honed in on the idea of breaking down the home buying process into manageable phases, a journey.
Iterations
From here, we generated 3 prototypes in Figma at low, mid, and hi-fidelities to test with users. When it came to testing, we provided users with tasks to determine if the design was effective and easy to use.
Usability Testing: Low Fidelity
Users wanted the financial tools to become directly part of the lesson plan
Users wanted to have a sentence or catchphrase that directs and informs them on how to get started with the tool
Rename the app from ZillowEd to My Guide
Adding a personal profile that would save the user’s lesson progress
Usability Testing: Mid Fidelity
The progress bar within lessons was not effective since it was in grayscale
Arrow features were not consistent and needed to be adjusted
Users were unsure of how My Profile connected to the application, this needed to be further clarified
Strategically use colors to help convey the message and make the experience more user-friendly
Deliver
Next Steps
Continue to explore making the current user flow less linear. Ultimately we’d like for users to be able to jump between lessons according to their needs.
We’d like to expand and further develop “My Profile” - a remaining question is how we can seamlessly incorporate this within the guide as users currently have to move between two tabs.
We’d like to further incorporate our new character of “Zuli”. We’re certain that there are more opportunities to add whimsy and delight.
And finally, we’d like to incorporate a text-to-speech functionality across the feature, especially within lessons, as we continue to strive towards accessible designs for all
Reflection
This project was my first experience applying the UX process in a group setting. I initially was nervous about how I would contribute to the group, but found myself electrified by the the user research process, specifically when conducting user interviews and usability tests. I found that I loved to engage directly with potential users and took joy in creating the structure/plans to lead consistent testing. I also continued to build on my love for creating stories, particularly in the development of Kate. It was exciting to be able to then see how these stories strengthened our design and clarity of the user’s needs.