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Product Design Lead
Systems Thinking
Qualitative User Research
Sales-Op Collaboration
2019 – Now (Ongoing)
For our home professionals (subsequently referred to as “pros”), their purpose is to apply their creative problem solving skills to help their clients achieve their dream homes.
However, pros who run their small businesses quickly realize the importance of having strong marketing and web presence. Oftentimes, pros don’t have the opportunity to focus on these facets of their business between client meetings and traveling between jobsites. This is where Houzz comes in with our professional marketing tools.
For the user
As previously mentioned, pros oftentimes understand the importance of focusing on marketing and having a website, but don’t have the time to invest to do so. Thus, many pros never get around to building a website at all. Houzz is here to deliver a custom, maintanable, and affordable website solution for pros that fit this description.
We’ve spoken to many pros who’ve paid thousands of dollars to get their sites up and running, not including the cost to maintain the site once updates come around. We offer this website building and hosting service for free if the pro is already paying Houzz for advertising or business managing services.
A key value prop for the Website Services product is the connected ecosystem it lives in with a pro’s Houzz profile. Traditionally, a pro would have to upload and update content to a multitude of channels like their Instagram account, Houzz profile, and business website. However, with Website Services, pros are able to sync important content such as business info and project photos between their Houzz profile and their hosted site. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for pros to start and maintain their websites.
Houzz Website Services makes it easy to sync content between a pro's Houzz profile and their business website
For the businses
Before I joined Houzz Industry Solutions, the product team already understood that Website Services was a great asset to boost retention. When pros are relying on us to host their website, they are much less likely to churn because of the great value and overall difficulty of migrating between web hosting platforms.
So when I came onboard, my main focus was to revamp Website Services to increase retention and new sales.
The old site designer had very limited customization options
When I was presented with this project, we already had a wealth of feedback from the customer success team about why pros were leaving Website Services. The primary reason was the lack of customization.
The previous team that worked on the legacy version had essentially built a set of 20 templates. Pros could replace copy and assets in those templates, but generally couldn’t add or reorganize content in the templated page structure.
The original version of Website Services before I joined the team.
The sites it created looked dated
In addition to the overall inflexibility, the preloaded templates were extremely outdated. The original template designs had not been touched in a couple years, and their age was showing.
Examples of the original, very dated templates
Sales & operations were unable to match the needs of pros
We discovered that a significant amount of pros had been oversold on the customization capabilities of the old site designer. We did have a team of sales reps dedicated to editing and updating these sites, but their frustrations with the lack of ability to deliver on our pro’s requests were growing as well.
Given the set of requirements from the previous product managers, I set to create some concepts that could help visualize how we could deliver a more flexible and modern site building tool.
The first part of achieving this goal was to define a system of modules that could be added, removed, and customized with unique content on the site.
Library of customizable elements of a site page, titled “blocks”
While ultimately we knew we wanted to go for a live-editing, WISIWYG experience, we knew that would be a significant investment for the development team of 5 people. So we focused on creating a side menu that acted as a mini site map where users could add, reorder, and edit blocks.
An example of adding site content with the MVP tool
An example of editing global site styles with the MVP tool
To validate the product direction, we recreated the existing sites of unhappy pros using the MVP. All of them were happier with the new version.
MVP site built with website services
International (Japan) site built with Website Services
In the previous phase, we’d validated that pros were satisfied with the level of customization that we introduced. However, more customization meant more complexity when it came to populating and editing content on the site builder.
This leads us to phase 2, where the main focus was to optimize the site building process for speed without limiting the existing customization capabilities. Our hypothesis was that if we added more templated items of frequently used content layouts, we could greatly enhance site building speed.
I set out to document and build a collection of premade combinations of blocks, which we called “sections”. This included different layouts for displaying single images, grids, contact information, and more. We tested this concept quickly with the sales team and pros alike and both found the direction to be easy to use.
I created a library of templated modules called “sections”
In a slightly separate effort, I also created a library of website templates to not only help the sales team showcase the product to pros, but also to act as a solid starting point for different types of pro sites that could be quickly customized with their own content.
Template picker showcasing clean and strategic sites for pros to start with
These templates at different levels are designed to be easily edited and expanded upon by our internal team in the inevitable case that we find other configurations that would help address different use cases. For example, I’m currently building out new sections that present awards and press features that link to external sites.
After extensive marketing research and pro interviews, our product marketing team determined that pros don’t really want a DIY solution, but rather a do-it-for-me website because of their busy schedules. Given this information, we set out to test this direction with a pilot program.
We were able to hire a graphic designer as a contractor to help us consult with and build sites for 30 professionals that had just signed onto Houzz Pro and expressed interest in having a website. At the end of each consultation, we gathered feedback for the pilot program by asking them to fill out a survey so we can understand how well a service like this would perform.
The feedback from the pilot program was overwhelmingly positive. This gave us the green light to hire an official team of 6 designers that are dedicated to designing and pushing live sites for pros in a streamlined consultation process.
I played a role in hiring these designers as well as onboarding them with the information we know about designing and presenting sites to the pros they’ll be working with.
User feedback from 30 data points on the website consultation pilot program
In the beginning of this year (2021), our team of data scientists conducted a Retention Cohort analysis to better understand the factors that fed into pros keeping their Houzz pro subscription.
To everyone’s surprise, they reported that while the retention rate for Houzz Pro subscribers without a website was 51.3%, the retention rate of subscribers that hosted a website with Houzz was at a staggering 91.8%. This number was so outstanding that the data team triple-checked their work to confirm the findings.
Retention analysis results comparing the retention rates of pros with and without Houzz websites
Working in a small product/ development team of 7 and delivering this product with massive scope and impact is really a continuous lesson in phasing and prioritization. The person who really helped me understand how to prioritize properly is Manji Pal, a great PM that I have been fortunate enough to work closely with and learn from.
In the beginning of this project, I was constantly walking myself in circles when trying to figure out what the right balance was between customization and ease of use. Manji fast-tracked the product by helping us systematically test certain directions and ship large features in strategic phases.
Learning to prioritize and phase is such an important skill for a designer to have. Too often, we slow progress down by having an all-or-nothing mentality. Focusing on delivering in increments with clear intentions is not only better for building the right kinds of features, but also kinder to our busy minds and schedules.
I couldn’t have done it without all these awesome people:
Manji Pal (Product Manager & drinking buddy)
Philip Law, Francois Picalausa, Jamie Sinclair, Yuya Oiwa, Doug Bacelar, Alan Xuan (Tokyo Eng Team with awesome ideas)
Karen Chang, Brooke Proctor, Liz Jaureguy, Brad Mannion, Brittany Sullivan, Adam Botma, Vincent Lobascio, Samantha Kumar (Spectacular Website Designer Team)
Yeseul Son (Iconography & Illustration)