JENNY ARDEN, CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER, ZILLOW -
DESIGNING THE HOUSING SUPER APP
Buying a home ain’t easy. It can be a fragmented, frustrating, often downright painful experience. You scour the market for your dream home, only to find that each property has its own unique set of flaws. You waste another weekend visiting open houses, only to find that what looked so perfect on your phone is a total dud in person. And that's all before you even get to the nitty-gritty of financing and paperwork! But there's a massive opportunity to revolutionize the way people buy homes, and it all starts with how the experience is designed. That’s Jenny Arden’s mission. As the first-ever Chief Design Officer at Zillow Group, Jenny and a team of diverse and talented designers are building the ‘Housing Super App’ we’ve all been dreaming of but (so far) haven’t yet experienced. It’s an ambitious goal, but Jenny is well-suited for the challenge. She brings more than 20 years of design experience to her role, having held senior design positions at Airbnb, Lyft, Nike, Google, and IDEO. Jenny joins the podcast to talk about why design is fundamentally all about organizing chaos, solving problems, and putting users’ needs at the center of that work. She explains the value of simplicity, inclusivity, and quality in design and makes the case for instilling human-centered design thinking into the culture of product development and across the business.
“A great business starts with the user and starts with a real human need. You design for it, you solve that problem, and you have a thriving business.”
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE TO LEARN:
- Why doubling down on design can help companies navigate uncertain times by focusing on solving user problems that may have been overlooked
- Why having a strong mission and obsessing over your customers are essential to great UX design
- How Zillow is using computational image processing and rich media to translate 3D into 2D to help homebuyers experience the true essence of a home
- How observing users in the wild through ethnographic research can reveal surprising insights that inform product design
- Why quality (and sweating the details!) is king in design — and perfection is the enemy
- What defines “inclusivity” in design — everything from hiring designers from diverse locations and backgrounds to considering accessibility and usability when designing for different users
- How design teams can collaborate most effectively with engineering and product peers and “speak the same language” (hint to designers: learn how to code!)
- Why the best designers are “divergent thinkers who are super hungry to solve real human problems”
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