Houzz Design Badge System

Houzz Pro Badge

Project Overview

The Houzz Pro Badge was a 0-1 feature designed for both organic and paid professionals to promote their businesses. Homeowners also benefit from the new badge system through more efficient professional matching. As the design lead, I drove the entire product design lifecycle from initial concept to final launch, covering both desktop and mobile platforms.

Key achievements include:
- Quality connection volume: ⬆18%
- Quality connection rate: ⬆21%
- Global premium subscription rate: ⬆2%

Project Type: 0-1 feature

Role: Design lead

Duration: Aug. 2019 - Mar. 2020

Tool: Figma

Problem & Goal

Homeowner: "missing matching indicators"

Professional: "lacking differentiators"

2-in-1 problem: "inefficient matching"

Goal - macro targets

Goal - micro targets

Design process

Foundamental research

To determine the best approach for enhancing pro-matching efficiency, I collaborated with research and statistics teams to conduct a series of fundamental studies. By following the 'funnel - validate - deep dive' methodology, we successfully narrowed the project scope to focus on the badge concept.

Field study

To dive deeper into homeowner's hiring journey, UXD and UXR teams flew to Houzz San Diego Office, sitting next to sales and marketing teams to observe how they interacted with real users. As a result, we managed to depict a homeowner hiring journey map with drop rate reflected.

Ideation

Following quantitative and qualitative research, I initiated the 'Badge' concept through competitive analysis and concept exploration, establishing a solid direction for the design solution.

Task flow

At this phase, I began developing comprehensive task flows for homeowners and professionals. These task flows allowed me to present complete user journeys to stakeholders and gather early feedback.

Iteration

With overall task flow settled, design entered iteration phase, focusing on making key design decisions with consolidated rationales.

Fine tune

In the final step, I focused on refining details such as iconography, visual design, internationalization, and content writing. By sharing these elements, the design team effectively communicated with stakeholders, including marketing, sales, and legal.

Decision making

Decision #1 - Amount of badges

When deciding to display three badges on the professional profile page, there was a heated debate about how many badges to show on the listing page. With options of a 3:3 ratio and a 1:3 ratio, I chose the latter as it provides better readability, scannability, and a guided user experience.

Decision #2 - 2-step flow

While designing over 20 badges, I realized that these badges were of various types(e.g. boolean vs numeric) that required different user flows. For instance, one of the most popular badge candicates was "X year(s) in business", which required user to key in specific numbers after selection. With collected user data, I decided to go with "inline dropdown" approach as it provided the best readability with the most intuitive interaction.