Opportunity Identification

During generative interview sessions with homeowners, we discovered that homeowners talk to neighbors for helpful tips around home remodeling. We also found that homeowners get a lot of inspiration and advice from their neighbors. 

So we asked ourselves, how could Houzz provide value for this type of user behavior? We knew Houzz:

• Has various types of content regarding home remodeling (photos, stories...etc)

• Knows users interests, and history on site

• Knows a lot of local professionals we can refer

• Knows users’ zip code

From this we came to find two different ways we could help users. First, users are interested in local content. Houzz can provide interesting and relevant local content. Second, Houzz can also provide a way for people to ask and answer questions in their local community.

Deriving Hypothesis for the local Q&A

Our second hypothesis was that users may be interested in asking and answering local questions on Houzz. However, we wanted to understand if many people shared the need for Q&A before deciding to invest heavily in building a feature in the product. So, we started by conducting a mass survey with a user researcher, and conducted competitive research to see how others cater to this type of user behavior. From this, we were able to confirm the hypothesis. Users do want to ask questions to neighbors and help answer questions from their neighborhood.

Testing, and Results for the local Q&A

I started the design process for creating a local Q&A space on Houzz by brainstorming with the PM and the lead engineer about different types of online communication mediums and their trade-offs. Doing this made us realize a discussion forum is the best medium as some questions will get repeated. Also, only a small proportion of users will likely respond so it’s important not to ask the same questions again and again.

Next, we brainstormed how we want to position this local Q&A discussion forum, considering we already had a global discussion forum with various topics. I explained tradeoffs of merging two discussions as opposed to having 2 standalone discussion forums. 

As I kicked off the design process, I also had to take into consideration the following How Might We (HMW) questions: 

• HMW get users to post a question?

• HMW ensure questions are answered?

• HMW make users know about the new product offering?

• HMW ensure contents are local?

• HMW ensure quality contents?

From this we decided to launch this flow for two cities only, and measure the impact of the launch before developing a phase 2 where we would decide which direction this local Q&A product would go based on the findings from the phase 1.

Overall Conclusion

By creating local communities, Houzz improved user engagement by xyz