During the summer of 2020, I organized and led a cross team Experience Audit of Zillow’s Buy/Sell Transact experiences.

Key findings emphasized that every designer and team was building forms differently, with inconsistent quality levels. This was not only expensive, but even worse, it was a really jarring customer experience.

Zillow’s grand aspiration is that people would use Zillow to sell their home, find their next home, finance with Zillow Home Loans and close with Zillow Closing Services, all in a “seamless transaction experience.” Instead, the organization was shipping our org structure to customers resulting in a low quality, high friction and untrustworthy user experience.

The Problem

The audit revealed Zillow had no standard practices for designing or building forms.

The Solution

The team developed a research backed cross-functional pattern, based in form design best practices, for use across Zillow Group’s product footprint.

Validation

We ran this new pattern through usability testing to validate that this direction was going to be easier to use than the original single page long-form.

The pattern performed very well and was subsequently built out by the rentals engineering org.