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 were using the existing community spaces. With these learnings, I led a reframing brainstorm and pitched an opportunity to expand the scope of the project and improve 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.

Opportunity Identification

1. From research (generative interview and survey) we came to realize that local Q&A is an opportunity for us. Users want to ask questions and help answer their neighbors’ questions.

2. There are two common ways of 'asking questions' and 'answering questions': messages, or discussion posts. But if we use messages, content is ephemeral and some users would see same questions again and again. Therefore it makes better sense to use discussions. Given that Houzz already had a 'discussions' page, we decided to leverage this page.

3. But first, we wanted to understand how discussions on Houzz were being used by users. So we dug into relevant data and conducted usability tests. From this, we found that there were usability issues, browsing issues, and awareness issues with the existing discussions page.

4. Looking at these issues, we thought about what we want to achieve in this design sprint. We could either 1) come up with a better discussion experience that incorporated local discussions or 2) do a quick test to understand the size of local q&a impact while also fixing usability, browsing, and awareness problems with the existing discussions page. We decided to go with option 2.

5. We designed a pilot to launch in only four cities and identified the following KPIs to track: WAU, time on site, number of new discussion posts / week, number of responses to discussion posts / week.

Current Experience

Phase 1 Testing

Changes we made to the existing design:

1. Posting flow: we leveraged the existing asking flow but added a ‘similar questions’ section that allows users to see relevant questions as they type.

2. New entry point: we made it super easy for users to enter the browsing page dedicated to ‘local neighborhood Q&A’. We also added an in-feed banner that allows users to ask questions without going to the browse page.

3. Awareness: we used tooltips and emails to let users know that they should test out these new features and added discussion content to the home-feed.

4. Traction: we used emails and push notifications to announce new local content to users.

Expanding the scope

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. With this new focus, I led a workshop to identify a more specific and clear goal: ‘Improving the experience of posting and experiencing user generated content (UGC)’, rather than improving ‘community’.

4. 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:

After aligning on high level strategy and getting on the same page with stakeholders around potential builds, my PM and I weighed potential impact of each pillar and prioritized considering dev resource needs.

Here’s what we decided:

1. Awareness and Traction is what we have already built for local community, and we should scale it to all discussion groups.

2. Consumption experience: considering that we know there are critical usability issues that contribute to low performance of the existing discussions, solving this would have a big impact. Also, we needed to decide how to merge local discussions with the rest of the discussions as it didn’t make sense to have two entry points for discussions.

3. Posting experience: if we increased the variety of posts, this could lead to a more engaging browsing experience.

After aligning on next steps, I proceeded to explore early concepts in wireframes, and pitched the idea to stakeholders. We are currently in the process of finalizing next steps.