Zillow’s experience design team gives you the resources, support, and opportunities to do your best work. You’ll collaborate, contribute, learn, and grow. And it’ll be fun!
Zillow’s experience design team gives you the resources, support, and opportunities to do your best work. You’ll collaborate, contribute, learn, and grow. And it’ll be fun!
We’re a team of more than 100 minds across six function areas, all taking a human-centered approach to solving user problems. With a shared focus on creativity, empathy, and precision, we work together to tackle every challenge with design thinking. Questioning assumptions, digging in, exploring, iterating—this is how we fulfill our mission:
We craft innovative experiences to make Zillow the most-loved place to buy, sell, or rent a home.
Product designers solve meaningful problems for Zillow’s customers and business through a robust user-centered design practice. They explore and define problems, imagine and design solutions, evaluate quality and usefulness, and continually increase the value of products and services.
The beauty of Product Design is that I get to actively exercise my interest in disciplines like Art, Human Factors, Engineering, Research, and more to come up with impactful solutions to real world problems.
Through a holistic systems-oriented approach, this team extends our design focus beyond digital touchpoints and considers every facet of the end-to-end user experience, both digital and physical. This includes identifying and integrating the people, processes, and technology that enable Zillow to deliver that end-to-end experience.
Service design uniquely positions us to think through complex problems and view experiences like an orchestra. I’m passionate about this intention to deliver value and design desirable experiences across multiple channels to meet customer needs.
Applying content strategy and UX writing skills, content designers ensure our products effectively deliver the information customers need to achieve their goals. This team defines and maintains product voice and tone standards, as well as style and usage guidelines, to create consistent writing throughout the user interface.
Content Designers have the best seat in the house! Because our voice touches every part of the business, it’s necessary to have an unobstructed view of the playing field, spanning from Product to Marketing to Brand, and even Legal and Corporate Relations. There are no silos, only opportunities for better connections.
Solving customer problems starts with understanding our customers. Our researchers pair a toolkit of diverse research and testing methods with in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis to deliver insights.
Why do I love UX research? It allows me to see the world through some else’s eyes. It helps us to connect the dots. UX research is important because it will enable us to discover and understand anything that affects a user’s experience with a product or service. When done at the beginning of the design process, it allows us to determine user needs early.
Zillow Design Program Managers optimize and ease the craft of design to build healthy and high-performing teams that consistently ship impactful work. They’re problem solvers who care deeply for our customers by orchestrating organizational process, systems, and experience improvements.
I’ve always been the type of person who loves to think about how design works. Design Ops gives me the opportunity to do just that, with a focus on creating and scaling ways of working that makes space for our team to focus on design.
The design systems team creates tools, processes, and a shared understanding between designers, engineers, and product teams on how to build consistent, high-quality experiences at scale.
Design systems, to me, is like a well-organized and -maintained workshop: There are tools, rules, and guides set up to allow creative minds to work faster and better together. Through our design system, Constellation, we can come together across the business to build seamless, accessible, and on-brand experiences at scale for our customers.
Most of our team is currently on the West Coast, because pre-pandemic we were split between Zillow Group’s San Francisco and Seattle offices.
The company as a whole has since moved to a distributed workforce model, with remote employees based all over the United States. In the future, while remote will always be an option, employees in select cities may be able to chose in-office or hybrid working models.
Thanks to asynchronous communication, a wealth of advanced tools, and a culture of trust and empowerment, our thriving, increasingly far-flung experience design team now has a researcher in Phoenix, a product designer in South Carolina, a content designer in San Diego, and candidates interviewing from all over the country.
Our team’s dedicated Morale Squad takes the lead in recognizing personal milestones and planning activities. Some of the highlights include:
Creative prompts encourage sharing and discussion that builds connections between us.
Our weekly happy hour offers a time for cocktail education and low-key socializing.
Gathering culinary favorites helps us explore our diverse traditions and cultures. View recipes
We reimagined Zillow’s favorite holiday for our remote team, with trivia, a magic show, a scavenger hunt, a costume contest, and more.
This virtual whiteboarding activity gives us an opportunity to express what we appreciate about our colleagues and teams.
By nurturing consistency and confidence, Zillow’s experience design leaders equip every person on the team to flourish. Scheduled check-ins help ensure you’re using your full capabilities, and identify new opportunities to contribute and grow in how you frame problems, execute on tactical and strategic initiatives, communicate, and influence others.
Articulating our motivations, beliefs, and defining qualities, then expressing them in “hero symbols.”
Evaluating our broad and focused skills, then setting goals that help us advance.
Developing design leaders, which means not only guiding individual contributors who want to become managers, but also strengthening our organizational culture through a structured growth framework that helps managers continue building their skills.
Zillow Group’s executive leadership team includes our Senior Vice President of Experience Design, a role established by Zillow cofounder Kristin Acker. This presence brings deep customer understanding and advocacy to the table; promotes the business value of well-designed products; and ensures decisions are based on testing solutions with real customers, then iterating with the insights gained.
With informed executive support for our organization, our design leaders can better serve the evolving needs of our customers, adapt processes to changing conditions, move concepts from abstract to concrete, and influence customer behavior across all touchpoints.
Our interview process kicks off with conversations with the recruiter and hiring manager. Candidates present a project or two from their portfolios to share their background and illustrate their design thinking, process, and approach to solving user problems.
Advancing to the next step involves presenting and discussing work with partners from design, research, and product teams, as well as talking through a hypothetical design scenario. One-on-one interviews provide an opportunity to discuss the role, the team, and Zillow life.
In 2020, Zillow Group and its employees raised over $1.2 million to directly benefit our communities. The Zillow for Good program allows employees to give back through payroll deductions, annual donation matching, time off for individual and team volunteering, and fundraising events like the annual Holiday Charity Auction.
Zillow Group is particularly focused on building a more just housing ecosystem by enabling equitable access to safe and stable homes for all people, regardless of their circumstance.
Our economic research on racial disparity in homeownership rates, home values, and rental application acceptance assists partners and policymakers in efforts to close the gap in fair housing and support communities who have experienced discrimination.
Within ZxD, we’re working to improve Zillow’s products and services through inclusive design. We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (level A and AA success criteria) and are developing inclusive language guidelines.