KELLER WILLIAMS
Manager of Product Design
We were working with an outdated product, fragmented across platforms, and hindered by siloed mobile and web teams. The design system was very much in it's early days.
To stay competitive, we needed more than a visual refresh — we needed a complete design transformation.
Our goal was twofold: attract more leads for agents and accelerate the homebuying process for users. That meant rethinking the user experience from the ground up and aligning cross-platform efforts under a unified, scalable design system.
I led the charge to modernize the product, streamline collaboration between teams, and build a design foundation capable of driving both user trust and business growth.
MY INITIATIVES
UX and UI Overhaul
A Compare Home Experience
New Design System
A Redesigned Homepage
ADA Audit
Design Process Enhancements
Redesigned Property Page
New ios and Android Apps
UX and UI Overhaul
Quick Blurb about it
A New Design System
I helped lead the rebuild our Experience Design System across all digital platforms KW.com, and our mobile apps. Working closely with our design system specialists, I led efforts to modernize visual styles, enhance accessibility, and create a flexible component library. This large-scale initiative required tight collaboration with designers, product teams, marketing, and executives to drive alignment and deliver a cohesive, scalable system.
Updates to App
I helped lead the rebuild our Experience Design System across all digital platforms KW.com, and our mobile apps. Working closely with our design system specialists, I led efforts to modernize visual styles, enhance accessibility, and create a flexible component library. This large-scale initiative required tight collaboration with designers, product teams, marketing, and executives to drive alignment and deliver a cohesive, scalable system.
Executive Summary
I led the design vision and strategy for the consumer business unit. Managing and allocating 12 designers and researchers. Our work led to 371 million home searches leading to 146.2 million contacts and over 7 million leads generated - helping cement keller williams as the biggest and best brokerage to work with.
We needed major design system changes, had a separate team for mobile and web, and an outdated product. In order to compete better with Zillow and Compass and to create more leads for agents and get homebuyers buying homes faster -
I launched and coordinated many redesign initiatives:
UX and UI Overhaul
A New color palette and photo style that felt more modern - and higher quality
A compare homes experience
A new style guide and component library
Templates for real estate agents
A redesigned landing page
A redesigned home search experience
A redesigned property page
An ADA audit and the subsequent steps to fix any issues
A new voice and tone that felt more inclusive of the real estate agent
Creating a Shared Product Vision
When you have a large team, many high powered stakeholders, and highly opinionated individuals whose business is on the line - it can be hard to create a compelling product vision and even harder to gain company wide buy in. In our unique case - we had to create products that worked well for both real estate agents and homebuyers.
As the leader of the consumer team - I leveraged our data, collaborative processes, journey mapping and storytelling and research partners to help inform our problem statement, product goals and feature list. There were a lot of moving pieces, but at the end of the day - it came down to listening and developing relationships with many people at the company. Working with the head of product and Eng. we formulated a multi-year strategy to build towards our vision through actionable and incremental releases.
My Steps for Creating a Shared Product Vision
Write your goals clearly
Describe the thing you're building
How you expect the change you're making to improve things and by when
How you'll measure that thing
Investment required to make that change
Look Beyond the Product
Distinguish between product and the product vision
Keep it inspiring! Team and stakeholders need to be motivated and connected to the product they are building
Post Release Retrospective
Did we end up building what we thought we were going to build?
How close were we to the original investment?
Outcome Retro
How much has what we built changed since we thought it was done?
Were there any benefits that we can prove from the changes we made?
How realistic were the outcomes?
Updating the Design System
The Keller Williams Experience Design System spanned all our digital products and experiences. That included KW Command (our agent oriented CRM), KW Connect, our internal training platform for agents and associates, KW.com our web based consumer platform and our mobile apps. Working alongside our design systems designers - we rebuilt our design system to include accessibility, more modern visual styles and an updated the component library to be flexible enough for our designers. It was quite a large coordination effort between many designers, product teams, marketers and executives.
ADA Audit
I led the design side on a major project to bring our existing site and future designs up to ADA standards. This was a major undertaking as it required action from PMs, Lawyers, Engineers and Designers. We found over 1000 issues that needed to be addressed to make our product compliant and after going through the process of fixing our violations - I came up with checklists, trainings, delivery and testing guidelines to make sure the new features we were building were compliant and inclusive.
Empowering Designers
As a manager it’s my job to empower designers to create and contribute their own ideas. At KW, I focused on creating a space for our team to explore possibilities and generate metric moving innovating solutions! I love when designers schedule adhoc meetings with suggestions and ideas. That's a sign of an engaged employee!
Some key outcomes that came from this were:
A redesigned property page that did a better job aligning with homebuyers expectations and encouraged an agent/buyer relationship
An open house app that could easily collect new leads.
A new photo style and approach to roll it out to 200,000 agents
My recipe for success involved many different focuses:
• Allowing them a large area of focus when looking for solutions. Instead of constricting my designers and PMs to one page, we made sure they were focused on the entire user journey.
• Encouraging them to constantly review and share great products that they have seen in the field. Our weekly meetings have a special time reserved for this sort of activity and it always leads to inspiration.
• Implementing structured brainstorming sessions and helping them craft and lead workshops with a wide variety of stakeholders. We built a very collaborative environment at Keller Williams by making sure our workshops were creative, fun and solution oriented.
Working with Real Estate Agents
I started the "Field Day" program - which paired designers with working real estate agents. It gave them a chance to interview them live and shadow their experiences, understanding where and how our tech was used. One new product result that was influenced by this was our open house sign in form.
Keller Williams has around 170,000 Agents! And we wanted to make them all happy.
We devised a few methods for keeping close to our agents and making sure were listening to them to help us discover ideas, problems and opportunities. This included:
• Tech booths and feedback workshops at our conferences - Mega Agent Camp and Family Reunion
• A beta group of agents that we could access whenever we needed to
• Field Days at local brokerages where designers would shadow agents at open houses and throughout their day.
Updates to Copy and Imagery on Homepage
I think it's always critical for a company to lean into their superpower. And ours is our real estate agents. We made a concerted effort through copy adjustments to bring agents and their impact more into the user's mind. Tiny steps like these are cheap to do, but can have large impacts
Adjustments included new copy that brought the agent into the picture, a more robust search experience that included finding an agent and a new photography style that focused on the reasons to purchase a home
Old Copy
Find your dream home
This copy only focuses on the person searching.
New Copy
Let's find your dream home
This copy brings the agent into the picture!
Old Photo Style
McMansion Stock Photos
This imagery felt stale and lacked perspective
New Photo Style
Photos that highlight the reason why you buy a home
This imagery brought out emotion and helped convey the reason to buy a home.
What I am most proud of…
What I learned
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