ZILLOW closing services mvp
Situation
Zillow acquired a title and escrow company, re-branded as Zilow Closing Services, in order to streamline the process of purchasing homes from customers through its iBuying business, Zillow Offers.
PROBLEM
We learned in research that the closing process is complex, stressful, and mostly manual experience where customers have no idea what is going on at any given point. Customers are asked for sensitive information repeatedly, and are required to fill out and sign countless forms that ask for repetitive information. Closing officers are working diligently behind the scenes, yet customers feel like it’s a “black box” where they don’t know what’s going on. The stakes are high – this is perhaps one of the largest financial transactions of the customer’s life. All while they are enduring the stress of moving, selling a home, and buying a home simultaneously.
THE SOLUTION
Our goal was to digitize and simplify the cumbersome offline closing experience. We aimed to help customers understand what was going on at any time, easily provide information and sign forms, and reduce the amount of duplicative information requests.
My role
I owned all content for the entire experience. I collaborated with my design partners on storyboarding, discovery, gathering information from SMEs, UX writing, legal reviews, stakeholder reviews, QA & bug bashes, and iterating post-launch.
Phase 1: MVP
Our MVP consisted of three phases of the closing process:
Opening Escrow
Due Diligence
Closing
Each phase consisted of complex considerations:
Different requirements for different states
Different flows for when there is a single seller or multiple sellers
Different experiences for the main seller and the co-seller
Multiple choices for notary and signing preferences, resulting in a tremendous amount of content variants
We used the existing task system to allow users to:
Understand when a new task is due — which included emails & onsite notifications
Answer a series of questions, ensuring that we don’t ask any questions that have already been asked in previous tasks
Map those questions into a document for esigning
Allow customers to sign and save documents
Request changes to documents and complete a new revision flow, if needed
These figma screens can give an impression of the massive scope and size of this project:
Phase 2: Iteration
Post-launch, we tracked customer feedback via customer satisfaction surveys as well as a Slack channel for our operators to flag issues that customers were having in real time. Collaborating with my designer, we synthesized this information and completed a heuristic evaluation of the flow, applying the tenets & traps framework to identify usability issues.
[SCREENSHOTS COMING SOON]