Zillow Offers: Designing for Operators

First-time home sellers are overwhelmed about the selling process. There is much to understand and do throughout the process which often results in confusion, outrage, and distrust. Zillow Offers was introduced help home owners sell their houses without hassle.

To support this consumer experience, Zillow required an army of operators working in the most efficient way possible. I let the design effort to build a better tool for operators spread across variety of teams. The focus was on increasing operator efficiency and reducing costs of acquiring a home by Zillow.

Home seller’s journey

To be able to sell their home to Zillow, home owners went through a 6 step process.

Operator teams & tools

In order to support the 6 step process, 6 different operator teams were setup to support home owners. Each team was using a lot of different tools to be able to complete there task.

The amount of users for Zillow Offers were projected to increase by ten times in future. This was a huge problem, given the way operators completed their work in low efficiency caused by using multiple tools to complete a single task.

Insights

Data is everywhere

Users have to scour through multiple tools to gather data they need to do their job.

Users are unable to focus on their goals

Most of their time is spent in completing tedious jobs like copying, pasting, updating.

We are at high risk for scale

90% of our users are still working with google forms, google sheets, etc.

Experience Outcomes (Jobs to be done)

Know what to work on next...in a timely manner and with less hassle

Have the information necessary to do my work...with less effort and more confidence

Create something...more easily and accurately

Stay on track...with less hassle and more confidence

Be notified of time sensitive information...that is more relevant, and with less/no false alarms

Resolve emergent problems...in a timely manner

Concept

After shadowing all of the operators and conducting field research, it was clear that understanding how data is flowing through the process is key to solving this problem. I set out to understand and document for each of the operator teams consumed and produced data points.

Data mapping per tool (Input & output)

As I were shadowing Zillow operators I made a list of all data points they needed to do their job and created visual way to understand which data points are being consumed and produced.

Data Map across zillow offers

I repeated that exercise until I had the data mapping for all operators.

Linked data map

Vision

After the data mapping exercise, I defines a way that could potentially inform UI for a tool that could be used by operators.

Data informing UI

The idea was to create a workspace where operators could look at the list of tasks they need to perform, look at specific data points needed to complete a task and perform actions based on that information.

Wire-frames

Final design

Result

Success for Zillow Offers was defined by number of hours operators spent on processing a home, which in turn provided the cost of owning a home before Zillow sells it.