ZILLOW MARKETING WEB DESIGN SYSTEM

Partnering with a team of marketers, developers, and a principle product designer, I took on the role of visual designer and supporting product designer to build a design system with over 400+ designs created and several responsive sizes included.

Problem

Marketing:
The marketing sites for Zillow contained a lack of consistency with the main product’s visual and ux languages. The marketing org needed wiggle room to depart from the main product’s design system in order to achieve marketing business goals.

Production:
Zillow’s WordPress dev team faced many challenges in building these sites from mismanaged code to a constant influx of requests requiring custom code. This lead to their team often maximizing their bandwidth and unable to meet Zillow’s business goals.

Design:
Zillow Group Studios, Zillow’s internal agency, lacked visual/ux guidelines in order to create sites that maintained brand consistency but also utilized web components that were tested for business efficacy. Previously, product design modules were being utilized and they often did not perform well when trying to achieve marketing goals. The content writers on this team also lacked any uniform guidance from their design partners on character counts as well as testing from marketing on what character lengths and variables proved to be successful.

Overall:
All three of these team’s also did not have a centralized location for code and design documentation.

During a revamp of Zillow’s marketing org, the marketing ops team realized they needed to overcome these previously mentioned hurdles in order to reach their new integrated web-based campaign landscape.

Business Goals

Allow the marketing org to test certain modules designed for marketing vs their product counterparts towards marketing specific goals. Clear the path toward a fast-paced web-centric campaign marketing strategy.

Give content writers the correct documentation and performance metrics to optimize copy created.

A library of documentation for all of these designs and code that is easily accessible to marketers, content writers, designers, external agencies, and devs.