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Zillow
UX Content & Brand Strategy

Crafting real estate UX for New Yorkers at all altitudes

StreetEasy was a real estate platform that New Yorkers genuinely loved, with a voice that felt inconsistent. Out East was a blank page. Working as the sole content and UX lead across both Zillow NYC brands simultaneously, I built the voice, systems, and experiences to give them both a sense of place.

My role
UX Content Lead — Zillow NYC Brands
Team
UXD, UXR, product, founders, real estate agents, picky New Yorkers
Focus areas
UX writing  ·  brand voice  ·  IA  ·  go-to-market
The challenge

Two very different products. The same underlying problem.

StreetEasy had a real relationship with its city. New Yorkers genuinely looked forward to the subway ads. The voice was sharp, irreverent, unmistakably local. But that brand identity stopped at the product door. Inside the app, the pages felt generic, inconsistent, and technically dated without content strategy to hold them together. Users had the tools, they just couldn't find them, understand them, or trust them enough to use them.

Out East was the opposite problem: a completely blank canvas. The StreetEasy founders saw an opportunity to take the Hamptons' outdated, barely usable MLS and build something actually worthy of its market. Just me and one UX designer built out brand naming and the full site from navigation labels to OOH campaigns.

StreetEasy

I'm apartment hunting here!

To close the gap between the brand New Yorkers loved and the product they were actually using, I led research on both sides of the marketplace, a top-to-bottom content audit, and a full content strategy.

Two-sided user insights
Research
StreetEasy had two audiences. For agents, I conducted market research and supplemented with industry events to map the tools they needed to grow their business. For apartment hunters, I ran qualitative user testing and attended community events to surface what features actually mattered to them.
Consumer onboarding & voice modernization
UX Content
I developed an onboarding experience for apartment hunters that introduced StreetEasy's full feature set while sounding like a New Yorker wrote it. Across nearly 100 pages and app sections, I modernized the copy to close the gap between the brand's irreverent public voice and the generic, patched-together product it had been.
Agent tools
UX Content
Agents needed a completely different register that was polished and purposeful. I built the UX content for the agent portal, listing tools, and lead-generation flows, making these professional tools feel credible and worth an agent's daily trust.
StreetEasy two-sided content strategy — serving apartment hunters and agents with distinct but complementary voices

Apartment hunter onboarding

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StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — welcome
StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — rent or buy?
StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — where you at?
StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — where do you want to be?
StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — how many beds?
StreetEasy onboarding
Onboarding — info capture

Agent tools

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StreetEasy agent portal
Agent one-pager — promoted campaigns
StreetEasy agent portal
Agent one-pager — powerful tools
StreetEasy agent portal
Agent one-pager — featured listing
StreetEasy agent portal
Agent one-pager — analytics
"

StreetEasy had a voice New Yorkers actually loved. My job was to find it inside the product.

Out East

Building a Hamptons real estate brand from zero

The Hamptons' existing real estate MLS was old, dated, and essentially unusable for the kind of audience that shops there. At the end of my tenure, as I was still running StreetEasy, our founders handed me a blank page and a sharp UX designer and asked us to build a new Hamptons real estate site.

Research was clear: Hamptons buyers are picky. Things like "south of the highway," "beach rights," "tennis courts" were make-or-breaks. Generic real estate filters didn't capture how this market actually worked. The IA had to speak the language of the audience.

Brand voice, IA & site architecture
Brand
Built the complete editorial voice for Out East from scratch to be warm, aspirational, and just self-aware enough to appeal to buyers who take their summer zip code seriously. Alongside the UX designer, I developed the full site architecture: homepage, saved homes, map-based search, filtering logic, and error pages. These pages had to be as discerning as the "I have to have a tennis court" crowd.
Brand launch & go-to-market
Go-to-market
I developed the full go-to-market content strategy that included email series, social media, welcome materials, and print advertising in local magazines. And because this is the Hamptons, we went one better: airplane banners over the beach.

Out East — site & brand

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Out East magazine ad
Print — Hamptons magazine ad
Out East homepage
Homepage — brand launch
Out East search
Search — no saved listings
Out East listings
Listings — clear IA
Out East saved homes
Search — hyper-specific filters
Out East iMac
Error page
Outcomes

When the product finally sounds like the brand

The improved StreetEasy content system meant users found the features, understood them, and used them. And engagement went up. Out East launched on time and on voice, with an active user base on month one.

+22%
onboarding feature activation for StreetEasy apartment hunters
↑ YoY
agent "advanced tool" usage and referrals
Hundreds
of StreetEasy pages and app sections modernized
Month 1
Out East attracted a full user base the month it launched
UX content strategy Brand voice development Information architecture Consumer onboarding B2B content design User research Go-to-market strategy OOH & print advertising In-market A/B testing Content auditing
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