HGTV Photo Inspiration
Turn your home decor inspiration into reality
SUMMARY
Spearheaded the product development of Photo Inspiration, an HGTV experience that helps users find home decor ideas. Increased mobile user page engagement +5%, time spent +13% and 30 day retention +6% in the first 30 days of launch.
THE USER PROBLEM
Fans know HGTV as the authority in the home decorating space, but it’s not always easy for them to execute on the ideas they find on shows like Property Brothers and Fixer Upper. As Product Lead, I set out to find out how exactly people were tackling their home decorating projects.
Through qualitative user interviews, it was clear that people would start by collecting photos on services like Pinterest and Google Images to determine their style, see what’s trending and find new ideas. But after collecting ideas, they were stuck. When clicking into their saved images or pins, they never knew what to expect - would they land on a how-to article? A site to buy a product on? Or a random blog altogether?
That’s where we saw an opportunity. By creating a one-stop shop for home decor ideas, we could help users turn their home decor inspiration into reality.
VALIDATION & FEATURES
For the MVP, we focused on validating and delivering the highest-value features that would make us stand out from the competition, while also leveraging the thousands of photos and galleries curated by HGTV editorial experts. Rolling out first on mobile, we kicked off with these features:
Filter by Room, Style, Color & Shoppable
By analyzing search data from HGTV.com and conducting in-person interviews, we found 90%+ users start collecting inspiration by deciding on a room to focus on, then playing with its style and color options. We used Room, Style & Color as starting points for filters, as well as adding a Shoppable facet so users could narrow down photo inspiration only by looks they could actually shop.
See the latest decorating trends
By conducting an intent survey, we found 40% of HGTV.com visitors come to the site with no particular project in mind, but just to check out what’s new in decorating. To cater to these browse-for-fun users, we added a Trending Ideas section to Photo Inspiration. In the coming weeks, this new feature alone drew a 10% increase in returning visitors to the site.
Explore more like your favorites
Once users found something they liked, they wanted to find more images like it. We introduced highly SEO-optimized Image Detail pages that led users down a rabbit hole of similar looks. Tapping “Discover More Like This” from a Detail page would drop them back into a feed of similar styles, leading to an average engagement of 50 page scrolls per visit.
THE RESULT
The Photo Inspiration MVP launch on mobile showed a hopeful picture. Within the first month, we saw that users who visited Photo Inspiration spent 13% more time on HGTV.com, visited 5% more pages and showed +6% in retention.
So what’s next for Photo Inspiration? A desktop and tablet version is currently rolling out to 25% of users, where we’re testing desktop-specific features like a photo light box and understanding how browsing behavior differs on a bigger screen.
As the product develops, we’ll look to make saving, project planning and product recommendations easier for all our users to become the onestop shop for home decor inspiration and action.
KUDOS
Design • Jeff Romaniuk • Sarah Hartley • Kristin Ingram
Engineering • Christine Jones • Kevin Malone • Oleksandr Liakhov, David Hodge • Dan Silk • Harish Pateri
Business & Content • Beth Rucker • Kelly Smith Trimble
