Kudzai - UX Design
HOMEUX STRATEGYABOUT
EQUITABLE DESIGN FRAMEWORK

Fair Housing Hub

Project overview

Project type: Self initiated company wide framework
Role: UX Lead
Timeline: 2 Quarters
Partners: Legal, Equity & Belonging, Zillow for Good, Design Leadership, Core team, Hack Week Team
Outcome: Company wide internal Resource tool launched under the Equity and belong team at Zillow

Platform: Web

According to our Zillow Economic Research team, Black home buyers, sellers and renters have the highest reports of unfair treatment and discrimination throughout their housing journey. This is a problem.



Opportunity



THE CHALLENGE
Acknowledging that the black experience is different.
The image shows share of respondents who said they’ve been treated differently because of their race.

THE OPPORTUNITY
Disrupt the Real Estate Industry again
We cannot prevent racism in the world,  but we can ensure that our products and services do not support racism and discrimination.

The Goal

Key Users: All Zillow group employees

Note: We are still in the process of segmenting the different types of Employees we will be serving.

Standard language and process

Allow for Design and Product when it comes to evaluating and critiquing our work for inclusivity and equity

Meeting industry standards

Most top tech companies have comprehensive Inclusivity and Anti-Racism frameworks for their products.

Avoid digital redlining

Redfin was recently sued for perpetuating redlining in their policies. We have to ask ourselves if our products are doing the same (view article)

Proposing the project

I drafted a project proposal to Design Leadership. I was able to get alignment with he objectives and goals of the project which led to me getting a green light to start working on the initiative.

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Building a Core team

Once we were aligned on the project objectives I was able to recruit some volunteers to help us with the initiative.

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Guiding Principles

Guiding Principle - 1

Our tech is not neutral

There are going to be winners and losers in our products. We have to have a clear understanding and acknowledgment of that.

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Guiding Principle - 2

Know your values and stick to them

If other people use our technology in ways we deem as harmful, we have ways of dealing with it.

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Key Definitions

  • Equality is defined as defined as treating everyone the same and giving everyone access to the same opportunities.
  • Equity is defined as giving everyone what they need to be successful.
  • Equality fails to address context and specific needs of a group. It provides a blanket “solution” and discounts that some need more resources just to get to the starting line.

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Source: https://muslimgirl.com/heres-care-equity-equality/

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Insight: Parallel Ongoing Efforts

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As we started working on the project we discovered that several teams where working on their own racial equity efforts.

  • The UX Research team was working on a framework to improve representation of subjects from varying racial and socio economic backgrounds
  • The Data team was working on improving their algorithms
  • ZO Product team was evaluating operators to ensure that they were not treating customers of other races differently.

Solution: Racial Equity Hub

While several teams and individuals are working on projects to promote racial equity in our product experiences, there’s little visibility across Zillow.

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The Racial Equity Hub will serve as an internal centralized source of information and inspiration for employees and teams working to make Zillow’s products and experiences more inclusive and equitable.

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‍Leveraging Hack Week

During the Second week of March, there is a Company wide Hack Week. In addition to the core team, I recruited an extra members to work on the Racial Equity project. The goal was to build our first prototype. We had 5 days to complete this work.

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1- Hack Week team

Role: Team Lead and Facilitator

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2. Design Brief

We created a design brief to capture our objectives and goals for the project.

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3. Key personas

  • Individuals/teams who want to incorporate racial equity into their current work
  • Individuals/teams who want to join and contribute to current efforts
  • Individuals/teams with a question or idea, who want to start their own project

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4. Inspiration

We spent time looking at ideas at how others were solving the issue of racial equity.

  • 8 Ways the Tech Community is Building Anti-Racist Products and What We Can Learn from Them
  • How to Begin Designing for Diversity
  • Advancing Racial Equity in Design: A Field Guide for Manager and Leaders (IBM)
  • Common Biases in Product Design
  • and more.....
From IBM's Racial Equity Guide

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5. Quick User Interview

We didn't have time to dig deep but we where able to plan 2 user interviews with people that worked in recruiting about their equity initiatives. They were conducted over slack.

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Here where the top insights:

  • There is misinformation even amongst top leadership that there is a limited talent pool of diverse candidates
  • They faced push back when sourcing diversity related recruitment data. They would love to see some sort of open database with recruiting pipeline data and team-level employee data.
  • Case studies on an exciting new project related to racial equity would likely be more compelling and inspiring to future candidates and demonstrate our commitment to E&B.

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6. Scoping

Based on our goals and research, these are the Content sections we will have:

  1. Why this Matters Section: Educate users on why Racial Equity is important
  2. Case studies Section: An area where we can showcase what others are working on throughout ZG
  3. Resource Section: A list of internal and external resources to get started
  4. Contact Section: Ways to get in contact with the Equity team, Legal, and other informed partners
  5. Suggestions Section: A way for users to add their input and give us feedback on the current hub

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7. 1st Prototype

Since this was a Hack Week project , we didn't spend a lot of time iterating. We came up with our first prototype:

Validation/User Research

(In Progress)

We wanted to better understand our Core Users and also get feedback on the current prototype. We recruited 5 employees that were interested in building their own equity frameworks.

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Research questions
  • What challenges do our core users face when incorporating racial equity into their work? How do they currently solve these challenges on their own?
  • What are our core users’ current understanding of racial equity work across Zillow? Do they feel like they have a good grasp on current projects, and how they might be able to contribute?
  • How do our core users respond to the current designs? What pieces of information do they gravitate towards, and why?

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Company wide Impact

Improved recruitment of diverse test subjects for UX Research studies by 15% in one quarter

  • I collaborated with UX Research Team. They wanted to start tracking and investigating the tools they were using to recruit subjects for studies. They discovered that 70% of their test subjects were highly educated and high income earners. Which meant that our research data and findings were not representative of all of our users. Those numbers were improved upon by 15% in one quarter.

Project successfully added to Roadmap as part of the Zillow for Good initiatives for the following year.

Sentiments from Leadership

I regularly share my progress with Design Leadership and we have been getting great reviews and feedback so far.

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