Case study: Zoopla Plus

Overview

Zoopla Plus is a subscription service that provides users with access to premium content and data about UK properties.

I was excited to bring together an incubator team in 2023 to explore new revenue opportunities, which led to the creation of a brand-new revenue-generating product for Zoopla. Through my direction, research, and hands-on design, we developed a property-checking tool that allows home seekers to learn as much as possible about a property before making an offer.

Launched in September 2024, it is projected to generate £1 million in its first year.

Company: Zoopla

Role: Head of Consumer Product Design

Year: 2019 - 2024

growth subscriptions marketplace hands-on

Problem to solve

How might we generate a new revenue stream for Zoopla?

Solution and outcome

After extensive research, iteration, and value proposition testing, one idea emerged as a clear winner: providing more detailed property data. This led to the development of a property report called Home Check, initially priced at £29.99. Following tests of different pricing strategies, we transitioned the product into a subscription model, now known as Zoopla Plus. Launched in September 2024, the subscription model resulted in a 36% increase in sign-ups compared to the original one-time payment option.

My Role

I led the design and played a key role in developing the strategy for Zoopla Plus. This involved:

Facilitating workshops and conducting discovery design sprints to define the problem and generate hypotheses.
Planning and carrying out a variety of research activities, including both quantitative and qualitative methods, moderated and unmoderated studies, as well as desk and primary research.
Analysing the opportunities revealed by the research and collaborating with the Senior Product Manager to prioritise them, building a detailed opportunity tree.
Running workshops and sketching sessions to explore and refine potential solutions.
Designing rapid experiments to test hypotheses, such as value proposition tests, A/B tests, or multivariate landing page tests.
Working with data analysts to gather further quantitative data to inform decisions and optimise solutions.

Learnings

Get together a small team of ‘doers’ who aren’t hung up on perfection and you create magic speedy innovation.
Test quick, early, often. It’s the mantra I've heard a 1000 times but it worked for us. As our COO put it “learning is our goal, weekly is our cadence”.
Don’t get hung up on a hypothesis, move on if it didn’t work and love the learning journey.

The Process

Discover & Define

The team and I got to work compiling all of our existing research and knowledge. We conducted a thorough review of the business to generate monetisation ideas and mapped them into an opportunity solution tree.

I applied design thinking methodologies, rapid research, and the "jobs to be done" framework to develop several value propositions to test with Zoopla's consumers.

The clear winner was property insights and data. Zoopla users are looking for peace of mind about the properties they're interested in purchasing.

Design & Experiment

Next, we set to work building an MVP for our home check report, iterating dozens of landing pages and banners to understand user intent. We followed a cycle of build, measure, learn - repeat.

I ran multiple experiments, including pricing tests, content multivariate tests (MVTs), and experimenting with the placement of tests on the site.

We learnt that flood risk, planning information, and crime statistics were the top data points consumers wanted to know about.

Our biggest insight was discovering that users preferred a subscription model over paying for a one-off report. This was a pivotal moment that drove the development of Zoopla Plus.

I designed the end-to-end flows for the later iterations of Zoopla Plus using Figma and Zoopla’s design system, Bricks.

Delivery

The latest iteration of Zoopla Plus was launched in September 2024. The team’s fantastic success led to a shift from an incubator growth team to focusing exclusively on developing Zoopla Plus and expanding the subscription business.