Senior Designer | 2022 | Zoopla
Highlights
6 Months | 2021
New landing pages and components
New homes team
Working on both B2B and B2C
Skills
Iterative design for A/B tests
Qualitative interviewing
Stakeholder Management
UX documentation
Zoopla is the second biggest real estate marketplace in the UK.
Problem space context:
New Home leads are the most cumulatively valuable (including marketing) for Zoopla. But they account for only around 20% of leads in a very good month and sometimes as low as 6% in a bad month because recently (in covid times) developments have been *forward sold
Marketing had owned the New Homes, so Product teams hadn’t considered the implications of the design of New Homes, such as search experience, the app, or how you save a listing or development
The main design challenges are in areas where we as a team have no remit such as a listing detail page, search results and saved properties.
*Forward sold a developer does not need to list with Zoopla because the housing market has been so good they have already sold most properties on a development sometimes even before building work has started. Up 9% from 2019.
Project Impact
Positive metrics
17% increase in viewing DDP page
Positive metrics
New flow increases leads sent x 4
Positive metrics
46% of increase in leads sent per session from DDP
We conducted in depth interviews in order to understand our New Homes consumer needs better:
Top learnings
We witnessed people having to go to painful lengths to find details about new build properties to compare. For example, most properties look nearly identical and use the same imagery. However, you can find huge price differences when you dig a little deeper, such as price per sq footage or fittings, etc.
People want to save not only ‘properties in development’ but ‘developments’ themselves and compare the two.
Floor plans are integral
People find it hard to trust rendering images yet want more imagery
People want to know what's nearby as often new build housing estates are out of town
People want to know what stage the development is at in terms of build so they have a timeframe for when they could move in
Government schemes associated with new builds are complex and hard to know who is in charge of what part. Developer, mortgage advisor or consumer?
Post interviews we mapped the experience across all Zoopla touch points noting what pages were platformed on, indicating whether there was ability to iterate quickly after speaking with our devs.
With these scoped areas we then presented this to multiple stakeholders and began the roadmap alignment conversations.
Although collaborating with other teams was a great start, we needed to begin work where we had remit. We decided to take our learnings and redesign the development page (DDP)
What made it :
The new image gallery which I designed has a 7% higher CTR than images on the LDP encouraging a global review of how we display images.
Added a Map with more points of interest and more on the way thanks to developers taking a new interest post launch.
I designed a new comparative table component with over half the traffic interacting with the component and again with more data points on the way post launch. This has now become a global component. We are also working with Yourkeys the newly acquired software team which help developers with their sales to test whether our work is bringing not only quantitative leads but quality leads.
What didn’t make it :
A timetable component of where the development was in terms of build.There were too many issues receiving accurate data and we felt the wording developers wanted to use would be misleading for our users. We later tested this and compromised but the data feed was insufficient.
Key features of the development - will take time we needed to build this integration on the development side to populate the page
By carrying out small A/B tests from the vision we were able to measure impact with minimum negative effect.
An optimised lead form.
Our hypothesis that a short lead form would increase traffic was overwhelmingly proved false. And after a couple of A/B tests we optimised the form.
Above is the old example the new below increased viewing of images by 17%
By just adding this simple component to a listings page we increased likelihood of sending a lead by 4x
Persuasion through performance
As a result of our work we have:
Increased traffic sessions to DDP by 17%
Increased leads from DDP by 46%
Successfully demonstrated the importance of designing for ecosystems rather than individual screens or features, by demonstrating that if a user saw both the redesigned DDP and a LDP in the same session they were 4 x more likely to send a lead.
The results of our efforts meant we could leverage action so we were able to :
Get the DDP on the app roadmap.
Collaboratively redesign New Homes search result cards and filter behaviour,
Get the remit to redesign the listing detail page for New Homes and in the process propose tests for global design changes.
Get the remit to redesign government scheme pages with the content team and provide them with components for Contentful Zoopla’s content platform of choice.
Replatform the new homes search page from main nav. Create designs optimising SEO opportunities to increase traffic.
Lessons Learned
Share your wins AND failures
Sharing the failure made a shift in the design team culture and made a lot of private conversations more open. I have never been thanked more for such a small gesture! I believe good culture includes transparency and a bit of real talk!
Cross functional relationships
None of the above would have been possible without establishing good cross functional relationships. Designing for the business means really understanding the business and its people!
More case studies
