Rebecca Zhang | Houzz Pro Nav

Responsibilities

Product Design Lead

Information Architecture

User Testing & Research

Dates

2019 – Now (Ongoing)

WHO

We empower millions of home professionals’ success

Outside of their expected jobs, most of the home professionals using Houzz (subsequently referred to as “pros”) run small business operations where they have to wear multiple hats, from marketing to finance to client management.

Houzz Pro is here for those pros to streamline their operations so they can focus what they love doing – creating meaningful spaces that last.

WHAT & WHY

An all-in-one project management, accounting, and marketing software for the busy pro

Historically, Houzz’s business model relied heavily on an advertising subscription program for pros to showcase their work and get new business.

However, with the growth of the platform and inevitable increase of competition between pros, we discovered that pros were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of new business leads that they were receiving from Houzz.

We found that there really was no other platform that was capable of offering pros a way to connect with homeowners, source their home furnishings and hardware, and manage their projects like Houzz could.

Thus brings us to the inception of Houzz Pro, an all-in-one tool for home professionals to grow, market, and manage their business.

THE PROBLEM

How might we organize all the tools a pro needs and deliver it in a way that is easy to understand and navigate?

When I had joined the Houzz Industry Solutions team, the leadership had already begun working on conceptualizing what Houzz Pro could look like. Unfortunately, they had not invested in speaking with our users to understand what their mental models of all the tools they use look like.

Thus, the first navigation design of the Houzz Pro MVP (minimum viable product) was driven mostly by HiPPO – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. We had put all our chips into a streamlined but inflexible organization where all features were organized abstractly into categories titled “Grow”, “Manage”, and “Source”.

There were a couple of key problems with this first solution:

User-facing: Pros did not understand the purpose of Houzz Pro. Many pros think of Houzz as an advertising-only solution, so they were confused and disinterested when we started adding project management featuers into the mix. The organization was coming across as fractured and hard to understand.
Internal: As we continued to develop new features, we had a hard time understanding how these new pages would fit into the nav. Many new features fell under the “Manage” category, and thus that section became super inflated and hard to navigate. In addition to this top level organizational mess, many Houzz Pro pages required a good amount of horizontal space. The primary left nav was taking real estate that would have been very useful for these space-demanding features.

PRELIMINARY RESEARCH

By leveraging feedback from user research and our sales channels, I set it upon myself to rearchitect Houzz Pro in a way that makes sense to our users.

I first had a meeting with our key stakeholders to map out all of our product features and pages.

Then, I worked with our user researcher to schedule user testing sessions in which we performed a simple card-sorting exercise to understand our pro’s mental models.

PROTOTYPING

I created 2 prototypes of the entire site, one with a vertical left nav and another with a horizontal top nav.

Initially, I’d just wanted to test Prototype 2: Horizontal primary navigation. However, we decided to keep a version that was closer to the control to see if smaller changes could be made. So, we kept our minds open to both options as we proceeded to user validation.

USER TESTING VALIDATION

Every pro that participated in research preferred the horizontal top navigation.

We did both unmoderated quantitative and interview-based qualitative tests to validate these design directions.

Quantitative testing: We set up a list of pages for the participant to complete using the prototype. The horizontal navigation had almost double the successful task completion rate than the vertical navigation did.

Qualitative testing: Much to our happy surprise, every single professional that we interviewed preferred the horizontal top navigation. They thought that this treatment presented Houzz Pro more as a holistic, unified experience. They also appreciated the dropdown under each menu item that helped them quickly access what they were looking for.

SYSTEMS & DELIVERY

I aimed to create a scalable solution for designers to mold their features into and for developers to quickly implement

REFLECTIONS

We work to deliver for our users, not for the higher-ups.

We really started off on the wrong foot by not getting early input on the directions we were pushing. I think this effort really proves how straightforward things can be if preliminary, rapid research was done to vet early concepts instead of searching for approval from company executives.

We’re hoping to see a lift in engagement and retention as a result of this large redesign effort. I genuinely feel like this is one of the only projects that I’ve had the luxury of doing by the books. Given the clear success of the user testing, I’m so excited to see how this impacts our numbers!

Thanks so much to these awesome people:

Xin Guo, Liscelyn Griffal, Inbal Malca, Tal Levy, Rachee Jacobs, Dave Anderson, Zach Peng (Design Cohort & Emotional Support)

Emerson Yu (Engineering Lead)

Roy Frenkiel (Director of Strategy)

Kelvin Young (Design Manager)

Paul Otto (Research)

Yeseul Son (Iconography & Illustration)

Case Study – Houzz Pro Navigation