Zoopla’s property search experience—the highest-trafficked user journey—had evolved organically over the years. 

Recognising the need to maximise business impact and value delivered to users, we needed to assess its effectiveness in solving key challenges for users and customers.

Leading at pace needs a Sprint

I advocated that a more holistic and in-depth approach was required so I developed and facilitated a week long Design Sprint to drive a focused business outcome:

"Design experiences that enable homefinders to quickly identify, assess and decide on candidate properties in their search for a new home - generating leads for our paying customers".

Outcomes achieved:

• Shared understanding
• Alignment on goals and risks
• New opportunities identfied
• And many new hypotheses to test...
   

Culture and Quality: Critiques re-booted

Valuable ceremonies are key to creating quality outcomes. I rejuvenated the Design Critiques, both large & small, in service of:

• Fostering a culture of growth and inclusivity in a psychologically safe space
• Learning from the collective wisdom of a diverse group of Designers, Researchers & content creatives.
• Raising our quality bar and encouraging a wider holistic view of the experiences we create.
• Encouraging discussion on everything from low maturity concepts to high-fidelity walkthroughs. Information Architecture, Branding, off-site experiences - the Crits themselves  - all were fair game!
  

Information Architecture initiative

Six months in, I was given the challenge: “Sort out the IA, Matt.”

While it could have been seen as simply redoing the 42-link navigation, it was a bigger opportunity—to align value propositions, content design, and information architecture with business strategy and user engagement.

Also key, was to take the org on the journey with me. So, yes we refactored the nav down to 7 core value props but also re-structured the core landing pages and main journeys/funnels on the site too. More important was the joint understanding as a Product, Engineering & Design collective which drove a significant improvement in user engagement and conversion rates.

Personalised experience strategy

Key to powering our personalised value propositions and realising business outcomes while solving actual challenges for our home-seeking and owning user base was to define just what we had to offer, what we required in exchange from our users and how to onboard folk, and continue to provide value. Enter 'Progressive profiling' - a continuous virtuous cycle of data exchange and user value. Bringing together our various value propositions regardless of where people were on their home owning cycle.

New Creative ad formats

Advertising is a key revenue stream, in my time at Zoopla I oversaw development of several new responsive ad formats to mitigate negative impact in user experiences and increase revenue through higher CPM costs as well as bespoke key Property finding and managing adjacent Partners to work on content partnerships with real user value. A key unlock here was also to drive the cross-functional collaboration that was required to achieve this.