Opportunity Identification

During generative interview sessions with homeowners, we discovered that homeowners talk to neighbors for helpful tips around home remodeling. We also found that homeowners get a lot of inspiration and advice from their neighbors. 

So we asked ourselves, how could Houzz provide value for this type of user behavior? We knew Houzz:

• Has various types of content regarding home remodeling (photos, stories...etc)

• Knows users interests, and history on site

• Knows a lot of local professionals we can refer

• Knows users’ zip code

From this we came to find two different ways we could help users. First, users are interested in local content. Houzz can provide interesting and relevant local content. Second, Houzz can also provide a way for people to ask and answer questions in their local community.

Hypothesis, Testing, and Results for the local content opportunity

Our first hypothesis was that users will engage with localized content from Houzz. To test this we decided to leverage email as a way to understand if this hypothesis is true and also to understand what type of localized content users would like to see. We chose email because it didn’t take a lot of dev resources, allowing us to quickly test this hypothesis and iterate. If the test was successful, we could apply the same concept to push notification and home-feed to further re-engage users.

My PM, analyst and I brainstormed what type of content users would like to see, and we started this test by launching ‘Recent projects in your neighborhood’ emails. This email proved to be very successful in both Open Rate and Click Through Rate. So, we came up with additional email types and have seen great results.

Next, we applied these learnings to push notification and home-feed (note, please click this link to understand the rational behind applying the same concept to push and home-feed).

Deriving Hypothesis for the local Q&A

Our second hypothesis was that users may be interested in asking and answering local questions on Houzz. However, we wanted to understand if many people shared the need for Q&A before deciding to invest heavily in building a feature in the product. So, we started by conducting a mass survey with a user researcher, and conducted competitive research to see how others cater to this type of user behavior. From this, we were able to confirm the hypothesis. Users do want to ask questions to neighbors and help answer questions from their neighborhood.

Testing, and Results for the local Q&A

I started the design process for creating a local Q&A space on Houzz by brainstorming with the PM and the lead engineer about different types of online communication mediums and their trade-offs. Doing this made us realize a discussion forum is the best medium as some questions will get repeated. Also, only a small proportion of users will likely respond so it’s important not to ask the same questions again and again.

Next, we brainstormed how we want to position this local Q&A discussion forum, considering we already had a global discussion forum with various topics. I explained tradeoffs of merging two discussions as opposed to having 2 standalone discussion forums. 

As I kicked off the design process, I also had to take into consideration the following: 

• How users will find out that they can post a question to a neighbor

• How users can browse previous questions from their neighborhood

• How we connect questions with relevant users who can answer questions

• How we surface the forum so more people can benefit from the content

From this we decided to launch this flow for two cities only, and measure the impact of the launch before developing a phase 2 where we would decide which direction this local Q&A product would go based on the findings from the phase 1.

Overall Conclusion

By creating local communities, Houzz improved user engagement by xyz