Jenny Arden, Chief Design Officer, Zillow - Designing the Housing Super App

Buying a home ain’t easy. It can be a fragmented, frustrating, often downright painful experience. You scour the market for your dream home, only to find that each property has its own unique set of flaws. You waste another weekend visiting open houses, only to find that what looked so perfect on your phone is a total dud in person. And that's all before you even get to the nitty-gritty of financing and paperwork! But there's a massive opportunity to revolutionize the way people buy homes, and it all starts with how the experience is designed. That’s Jenny Arden’s mission. As the first-ever Chief Design Officer at Zillow Group, Jenny and a team of diverse and talented designers are building the ‘Housing Super App’ we’ve all been dreaming of but (so far) haven’t yet experienced. It’s an ambitious goal, but Jenny is well-suited for the challenge. She brings more than 20 years of design experience to her role, having held senior design positions at Airbnb, Lyft, Nike, Google, and IDEO. Jenny joins the podcast to talk about why design is fundamentally all about organizing chaos, solving problems, and putting users’ needs at the center of that work. She explains the value of simplicity, inclusivity, and quality in design and makes the case for instilling human-centered design thinking into the culture of product development and across the business.

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