Nextdoor
Business Experience

Lifting business recommendations 15% with AI-powered discovery

ROLE

Staff Product Designer

SCOPE

Business discovery, recommendations, and bookmarks across Home Feed, Map, and Pages

TEAM

Engineering Manager, Product Manager, Product Designers, User Researcher

Reframing the problem

Reframing the opportunity

76% of neighbors said community shaped their purchases, but that word-of-mouth was buried in conversations. Removing the legacy tagging flows dropped engagement 42%, to over 200 daily interactions on a platform serving 1 in 3 US households.

Framed the work as two jobs to be done which became the filter for decisions:

Neighbor: help customers show support for local businesses so they thrive.

Business: help businesses prove their reputation so they grow new customers.

Key Design Decisions

01

Surface word-of-mouth content

Make user feedback visible and discoverable to build customer trust with local businesses.

02

Optimize for actions

Make it easy for customers to find and share the businesses they love

03

Reduce participation friction

Let users discover, save, and share businesses with ease through familiar patterns

OLD LEGACY TAGGING FLOW & LEGACY PAGES

Product & Design Strategy

Four guiding pillars that became the north star for every tradeoff and stakeholder conversation.

01

Fix broken taxonomies

Repair recommendation pathways that became broken after system changes

02

Improve core usability

Make it intuitive for users to find, evaluate, and take action on businesses.

03

Provide path to shares

Create more natural opportunitiies to save and share businesses using universal interaction patterns

04

Improve performance

Address the latency and reliability issues that blocked engagement.

Lead Vision, Systems, and Team

01

Vision & Strategy

Defined the product vision and ran principles workshops with designers and PMs, giving shared language for every tradeoff.

02

Design System

A/B tested the business card for visibility and feed depth, consolidating three variants into one component reused across feed, comments, and pages.

03

Team

Mentored two designers, settled stakeholder debates with shared principles, partnered with trust and safety on abuse prevention.

Role & Scope

STRATEGY

Defined product strategy and design principles

Illustrated Jobs to be Done to align teams

Partnered with PM on success metrics

EXECUTION

Led end-to-end design across phases

Owned all shipped screens for business pages

A/B tested business card components

Partnered with ML team on busiess & recommendation detection

LEADERSHIP

Mentored two product designers

Led design principles workshop

Resolved stakeholder debates with shared principles

Coordinated with trust and safety on abuse prevention

Results

SHIPPED IMPROVEMENTS 2022-2023

TOTAL
RECOMMENDATIONS

+15%

IN-COMMENT
RECOMMENDATIONS

+84%

COMMENT
BOOKMARKS

+22%

HOME FEED
BOOKMARKS

+9%

PAGE
BOOKMARKS

+14%

SHARE
RATE

+2%

Note: the +84% reflects in-comment engagement including business owner self-mentions, an edge case the ML classifier had not modeled. Total recommendations lift was +15%. I scoped a fix with the vitality team to filter self-mentions before transitioning off.