Navigating back-and-forth between the shopping page and a listing page is one of the largest time taxes during the shopping experience. Often, users just want to look at a home's photos but must load the entire page to do so.

By displaying results and listing pages side-by-side, there's less context shifting and perceived loading times. We also preserve the user's preferred result set (map or list) by remembering where they clicked first. For example, if you click a map marker, we retain your map of results and animate in the listing you selected.

This in-page listing resulted in pages/visit up 15% and a 3-5% increase in agent contacts (our core revenue metric).

This was an early test for both SEO and responsive web techniques within Zillow. Our goal was to build a lightweight list page and test if it had a meaningful impact on our SEO rank. The theory was that loading the map components increased the page load time (which Googlebot penalizes) and that a simpler photo and list view may also be more inviting for SEO users (since Googlebot also penalizes returns to the search page).

Additionally, this was a first step for Zillow to move toward a responsive site. Up until this point, Zillow built "adaptively" - separate sites for desktop and mobile. I was an early advocate for responsive within the company as the adaptive method didn't take into account the growing variety of resolutions. It also meant we had to build features twice, once for each site.

I built a prototype to help socialize the idea within the company and show the benefits of building responsive. It was also a helpful tool for the developers to understand the responsive behavior at different resolutions.

I designed the flagship Zillow apps for over three years during the initial mobile "gold rush." As the mobile leader and in real estate, we shipped apps across all major platforms including iPhone, iPad, Android, Android tablet & Kindle, and Blackberry.

Zillow was an early investor in mobile and our goal was to have a useful, native app on every device. We were even a launch partner for the iPad and the app I designed was featured on stage behind Steve Jobs!

As lead designer for the Shopping team, I designed the shopping experience on mobile web, including the map & list pages and homepage entry points. Mobile web was a rapidly growing audience for Zillow and we continuously iterated and refined the experience for mobile browser shoppers and SEO entry users.

The previous listing header had quite a few issues. Information on the home was spread across multiple blocks of data. Additionally, each page template had a fixed set of data points. This caused "Unknown" to be displayed many times which isn't helpful.

My goals for the redesigned experience included an improved hierarchy, better data organization, and a greater emphasis on photos. We also restructured the data to more dynamically show what we know to avoid the "Unknown" issue.