What Home Means to Zillow Employees: A Visualization Series

At Zillow we spend a lot of time thinking about what home means to our users. This Hack Week I decided to take a deeper dive into what home means to people who work at Zillow. I wanted to capture both quantifiable measures of employees' home lives and also the more intangible reflections of what home means to each of us.

Data visualizations are a fun way to make statistics more accessible and give people a way to visualize relationships inherent in pieces of information. During Hack Week I worked on creating some interesting visualizations to reflect the makeup of the Seattle office. I collaborated with Lauren Bretz from the data science team to create survey questions that were a good gauge of Zillow employees' thoughts and feelings on 'home.' Over 400 people completed the survey.

The survey asked employees for three adjectives that describe their home--I started out by using these adjectives to create a word cloud in the shape of a house. The word cloud, or word house, contains words that we associate with our homes.

[Attachment]

For this next visualization, I focused on the transitions between renting, buying, home-owning, and selling. I used responses from the survey to calculate employees' likelihood to remain or transition into various categories based on their plans to move. For example, for homeowners that said they were likely to sell within the next year I added transitions from home-owning to selling. For those that said they were likely to sell within 5 years I added 0.2 as many transitions. For those that said they were unlikely to sell at all I did not add any transitions.

These calculations gave me a basic idea of what the transitions between sellers, buyers, homeowners, and renters look like. I visualized these transitions in the form of a chord diagram, which is designed to represent the relationships and transitions between particular groups.

[Attachment]

Notice that homeowners transition to buyers and sellers fairly frequently (movement from Homeowner to Buyer and Seller), but very few homeowners transition to renters (the thin purple ribbon from Homeowner to Renter).

The next visualization I created was an interactive representation of the big divisions of Zillow and their makeup based on whether or not they see themselves as homeowners, renters, buyers, or sellers. The bubbles bounce around, which makes this one interesting to play with.

The next chart visualizes the breakdown of Zillow employees in a different way. First it shows a split by which stage of homeownership they identify with (renting, home-owning, buying, or selling), then a split by division (Business, Technology, or Sales) and finally a split by the makeup of their home (partners, roommates, pets, etc.)

[Attachment]

Let's drill down on the technology division to get a better look:

[Attachment]

Finally, let's look at our buyers:

[Attachment]

This tree map shows us the different components of Zillow employee households and how they fit together.

For my next visualization I created a random quote generator based on employees' descriptions of their ideal homes. Describing a dream in great detail has been shown to increase the likelihood of meeting goals, so try it out! This quote is an entertaining description of a home.

[Attachment]

I got a broad range of results from this one. Here's another fun one:

[Attachment]

Next I looked at the places in the United States we call home. Using information about employees' state of origin I created a map of Zillow employees based on the density from each place. The darker states (like Washington and California) have more employees and the lighter states have fewer.

[Attachment]
This next visualization is a good finale to the project. I used adjectives from people's responses to create a fireworks display. Enjoy!