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Zillow Home Loans Landing Page
A customer-facing experience created to help home buyers navigate the Zillow product ecosystem with ease.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE
Generate awareness of Zillow Home Loans (ZHL) as a financing option for "ready" financially eligible buyers, and introduce Zillow as a trustworthy & educational guide for "unready" buyers.
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Who is a "ready" buyer?
Someone financially capable of purchasing a home and eligible for financing with ZHL. Typically, this person can buy in 3 months or less.
Who is an "unready" buyer?
Someone incapable of financing through ZHL due to high debt or low credit. This person is typically early in their home-buying journey and lacks knowledge about the process.
THE OPPORTUNITY
1. What?
First-time buyers who are starting their home-buying journey on Zillow struggle to find and understand financing options and do not feel confident in their financial preparation or the overall process of buying a home.
Most home buyers don’t realize that Zillow offers loans and don’t think of Zillow as an option for financing.
2. So What?
Confusion and lack of direction cause a lot of first-time buyers to feel stuck and unable to move forward with home buying.
Lack of awareness of ZHL means that ready and eligible buyers are missing out on a viable financing option.
3. Now What?
There is an opportunity to begin addressing these issues through a new, high-visibility, home loans landing page that begins to offer financial readiness guidance and helps buyers find their way.
HOW MIGHT WE?
help ready buyers understand the value of Zillow Home Loans and meet their financing needs?
offer informed guidance to help buyers become financially ready for home ownership?
FOUNDATIONAL WORK
We launched a series of workshops to help set goals, develop a strategy, and frame the problem.
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DEFINING "READINESS"
The terms “Ready Buyer” and “Unready Buyer” were used a lot at Zillow, but what exactly did they mean in the context of affordability and financial preparedness?
As a team, we set out to define a buyer's "readiness" by identifying what they say and do, think and feel, and see and hear at each stage in the home-buying journey.
OBJECTS, RELATIONSHIPS, CTAs, & ATTRIBUTES (ORCA)
We looked to ORCA as a tool to help us understand and analyze our research findings. Our goal was to gain a broader perspective of the complex homebuying experience on Zillow from a user's lens and identify how we could better help them make sense of it.
We mapped out the all objects a user might interact with within Zillow's mortgage ecosystem. Some objects we uncovered included BUDGET, LOAN, and APPLICATION (spoiler alert: there were many more objects).
After identifying all the possible objects customers might interact with during their buying journey we plotted out how they related to one another. For example, an APPLICATION is required to determine eligibility for a LOAN. This layer of definition allowed us a window into what affordances (CTAs) and attributes (metadata) the landing page might need for both ready and unready buyers.
GUIDING DESIGN PRINCIPLES
We generated design principles to guide us through our ideation phase. These principles acted as a beacon and helped the design team remain aligned on a consistent vision of what makes our product experience unique.
"Design principles should be specific enough to differentiate us from other products, reflect our values, and help us make decisions, but broad enough to apply universally to our product."
- Riana Dawson, principal product designer
SOLUTION
I completed several rounds of ideation from low to high fidelity to explore potential solutions for a landing page that could serve homebuyers of all readiness levels, generate awareness of Zillow as a qualified lender, and provide educational value to buyers with little knowledge about home buying.
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SECTION ONE:
Goal: Capture buyers who are ready for funding and know they want to use ZIllow Home Loans.
Providing customers with a quick and easy way to either dive right into the application or decide to explore more options.
SECTION TWO:
Goal: Convince buyers who are ready for funding but unsure of Zillow Home Loans.
Sharing testimonials that showcase the value of Zillow Home loans and transparently providing loan options that a customer may be eligible for if they apply with Zillow Home Loans
SECTION THREE:
Goal: Provide educational guidance to buyers who are not ready for funding AND establish Zillow Home Loans as a trusted partner for their home buying journey.
Meeting our customers where they are by giving them the chance to learn about their personal budget with the newly created affordability calculator, get pre-qualified, or just jump right in and chat with a trusted expert.
PASSWORD PROTECTED
OUTCOME
The landing page experience launched in February of 2023. We plan to evaluate and validate overall success based on the following:
1. Does the landing page generate an increased amount of lead generation & revenue?
2. Does organizing the CTAs by journey stage help us better meet buyers' needs?
3. Do buyers have a better understanding of how to move forward with the ZHL financing process?
4. Do buyers accurately self-identify themselves based on the journey stages we have defined?
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MARCH 2023 FOCUS GROUP
While we haven't gotten official metrics back, I was able to qualitatively test the landing page experience during a multi-day focus group with buyers of different readiness levels. Here's what I heard:
"I didn't know Zillow even did home loans but, if I saw this page, I think I could trust them more to lend me money"
Novice Buyer
"I like how the landing page gives quotes from other customers who've gone through the process before. If I were looking to buy, I would want to learn more about Zillow's mortgage business."
Advanced Buyer
"The interactive calculator section is cool, I love how it tells me what I can afford and also shares articles that compliment where I'm at in the process."
Mid-Stage Buyer
Quotes have been altered to protect the information collected from research participants under NDA.
REFLECTION
SUCCESSES +
Over the course of approximately 6 months, I was able to leverage my skillset to create the Zillow Home Loans landing page, which was a completely new touchpoint in our product ecosystem that will help homebuyers get started with financing.
This project gave me an opportunity to showcase my strategic thinking and interaction design capabilities, as well as my ability to think creatively to come up with a multifaceted solution that satisfied multiple user and business scenarios.
CHALLENGES -
There were many challenges I had to overcome as the design lead. This was a high-visibility effort across several lines of business at Zillow, meaning that I needed to consider feedback from multiple stakeholders across design, content, product, marketing, engineering, and legal teams.
I found myself struggling to clarify ambiguity and satisfy competing priorities at several points in the process. Overall, this project strengthened my ability to think big and move fast and also to stand behind my own design perspective amongst many other voices in the room.
PROJECT DETAILS
COMPANY
Zillow Group, Inc
SUBSIDIARY
Zillow Home Loans, LLC
DATE
2022
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TEAM DETAILS
MY ROLE
Product Design Lead
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Project definition & strategy
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Competitor research & analysis
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Low fidelity wireframes
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Detailed designs & asset creation
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Stakeholder presentations
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Design workflow management
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Provided direction to design team
COLLABORATORS
Design & Content
Riana Dawson, Maya Luke, Nafkot Kidane, Chantel Graham
Product Lead
Kimberly Mayhle
Engineering Leads
Michael Chamoures, Abishek Savant
SEO Partners
Alicia Lucio, Tali Bendzak
PASSWORD PROTECTED
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