Improving Community Discussions on Houzz
Identifying a larger opportunity from a small pilot
tl;dr
This initiative started from an insight that home remodelers want to ask their neighbors questions and also help answer their neighbors’ questions. We wanted to make Houzz a place for users to easily do this and started off with a simple flow to test engagement on local discussions. In the process of designing and launching the pilot, we learned a lot about how users used the existing community spaces. With these learnings, I then led a brainstorm to reframe the goal of the project and pitched an opportunity to expand the scope of the project to improving the overall community discussions experience on Houzz.
My role
As the lead designer on a team of 3 product designers, I worked cross functionally with 2 PMs, 12 Developers, 1 Product Marketing Manager, 1 Researcher, and 2 Graphic Designers across Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. I was actively involved in every step of the process: from leading strategic brainstorm sessions and setting roadmaps to creating projects and mentoring junior designers.
Introducing local community
Entry and discovery points
Question flow
Emails and push notifications to drive users back to Houzz
Expanding the scope
The goal of the local community project was to understand the importance of local community to users and what types of questions they would ask.
But as we dug into the data around discussions, we realized that there were a lot of opportunities to improve the existing discussions experience. Furthermore, the retention rate for discussion users is 2x non-discussion users, while only 20% of users have used discussions. This meant that if we could get more users engaged on discussions we could potentially improve overall retention.
With this new focus on improving the existing discussions experience, I led a workshop to identify a more specific and clear goal: ‘Improving the experience of posting and experiencing user generated content (UGC)’, vs. the previous goal of improving ‘community’.
Next, we used the insights we had collected from generative user interviews, usability tests with current discussion users, competitive research, and multiple brainstorm sessions to identify both strategic pillars and tactical directions that would create a better UGC experience. These are:
Strategy and tactics of how we can improve UGC experience on Houzz
Aligning on strategy for the next phase
Aligning on phase 2 roadmap
key problems we had uncovered in this phase
Presenting options to stakeholders
After aligning on next steps, I proceeded to explore early concepts in wireframes, and pitched the idea to stakeholders to align on the product vision.
Usability test and data showed that the existing topics selection is under utilized. In the new design, we get users to relevant topics and contents as quickly as possible
In the existing experience we forced users to post a question first, before choosing which topic to post to. Data and research showed a lot of friction in this step. In the new design, there’s no topic selection, and there’s specific posting types to help users create more varied contents.
Overview of the new structure. It’s a much more engaging experience as it has more contents. This new structure also allows us to recommend different types of UGC content easily through email, feed and push.
Setting up small tests to confirm direction
aligning on roadmap of projects
phase 2 Project status (more to come as we do more design)
