Introduction

StreetEasy is transforming the real estate experience across New York City and Hudson County, New Jersey.  To enhance our customers’ experience during this complex real estate shopping journey, the StreetEasy engineering team has developed a lightweight workflow service combined with server-driven UI to enhance website experiences for consumer interactions.  

Koios (pronounced /key-os/) is a service tailored for Zillow brands. It was designed with the goal of providing internal teams with the ability to quickly create and improve upon experiences on the website or mobile app where consumers interact with flow-driven actions. We achieve this by making Koios configuration-driven and accessible by web and mobile clients. We want to make sure we account for new experiences as well as supporting integration with existing services and systems. In short, we want to:

• Accelerate product iteration cycles
• Enable dynamic, server-driven flow actions
• Facilitate seamless data collection  and integration
• Illuminate insights and self-service workflow

Accelerate product iteration cycle

In the world of product development, every minute counts. Our product team faced significant challenges when implementing new onsite experiences. For instance, we had to create custom solutions whenever we wanted to gather information from our web and mobile app users about being first-time home buyers in New York City. This process was not only time-consuming, but also required meticulous planning to ensure scalability and alignment with product expectations. It often took several months, or even quarters, to bring these experiences to life.

Aside from the lost time, the real struggle began when we realized that the solutions we painstakingly built didn’t always align with our business objectives. For example, in addition to the initial inquiry about being a first-time home buyer, we wanted to inquire about the user’s financing availability. Making modifications and iterations to the existing setup proved to be a cumbersome process that extended over weeks and months due to rigid data schema and integration constraints.

Faced with these challenges, we recognized the urgent need for a more flexible and adaptable solution that could cater to the dynamic nature of our business requirements. Enter Koios, our game-changing solution designed to revolutionize how we approach product development and iteration cycles. By leveraging Koios, we aim to accelerate our product iteration cycles, streamline the development process, and ensure that our solutions are not only efficient but also aligned with our business goals. With Koios, we are poised to transform the way we innovate and respond to every shift in the market and our users’ needs.

Koios’ innovative solutions help to speed up the iteration cycle, making development and deployment more efficient:

Centralization of Business Processes

Koios centralizes business processes and logic in JSON representation, enabling a standardized and visualized understanding of past implementations.  Now we can  make changes and iterate quickly without  delving into JavaScript code.

In addition, we can easily observe customer progress through these workflows in real time , using standard distributed tracing tools—without the need for time consuming custom analytics integration.  

No Frontend Code Changes

With Koios, minor modifications to existing workflows and business processes can be made without altering app or web frontend code. Once you have updated a JSON file with the necessary data changes and deployed  the new JSON template, the experience across all platforms automatically updates without requiring web or app deployments.

Reusable Design Components

Koios leverages reusable design system components and workflow templates, allowing for efficient software architecture. It also provides users with multiple levels of reusable abstractions, such as workflow templates, page templates and elements templates.

Enable dynamic server-driven flow actions

Koios introduces a server-driven decision tree workflow tool that streamlines the creation, management, and execution of decision trees from the Koios back-end service. Decision trees visually map decision-making processes, with nodes representing actions and branches indicating possible outcomes.

Diagram: Shown above as a home shopping scenario, a survey workflow in Koios can identify a user’s actions, such as attending an open house without a qualified loan. By dynamically connecting to backend databases via GraphQL API, Koios leverages data insights to personalize the user journey and provide a seamless customer experience.

Managed on the back-end Koios server, the decision tree workflows ensure centralized control, updates, and scalability. This server-driven approach allows multiple teams to collaborate on decision trees simultaneously, enhancing workflow efficiency without disrupting each other’s progress.

Seamless data integration and Collection

Koios is dedicated to seamless data integration and collection, in order to meet the complex business requirements at Zillow’s scale. Here’s how Koios supports these key functional areas:

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and Data Warehousing

Koios streams workflow output data to Apache Kafka, which is then ingested into Zillow/StreetEasy’s Snowflake data warehouse. The data in Snowflake undergoes further processing through a pipeline to integrate data from various sources, preparing it for analytics and reporting with tools like Tableau or Excel.

Federated GraphQL Integration (APIs)

Koios enables seamless integration with Zillow/StreetEasy’s backend systems through federated GraphQL APIs. This integration allows for real-time, data-driven decision-making actions within the decision tree branching logic of Koios workflows.

Event-Driven Architecture

Koios supports event-driven architecture, capturing and processing events or data in real-time. For example, Koios can trigger workflows based on real-time consumer actions, such as user interactions with home listings, to provide interactive assistance and personalized experiences on the Zillow/StreetEasy platform.

Data Streaming

Data captured in Koios is streamed in real-time to Zillow/StreetEasy’s eventing systems, ensuring seamless integration and scalability. Events generated by Koios workflows are sent through our clickstream platform to our data lake for consumption in Zillow/StreetEasy’s customer data platform, enabling a fault-tolerant infrastructure for data collection and analysis.

Empowering stakeholders by illuminating insights and self-service workflow

Koios revolutionizes stakeholder empowerment by offering a self-service workflow system that streamlines processes and enhances visibility within organizations. Through a centralized admin UI, all stakeholders gain access to graphical representations of business processes, fostering clarity and collaboration without the need for extensive coding knowledge.  Stakeholders do not require any coding expertise to create new questionnaires and form workflows.

Here is an example screenshot of our Admin UI, which provides an overview of all the available workflow experiences in one central location:

Key advantages of Koios’ self-service workflow service include:

Standardized Processes

By implementing a self-service workflow process, Koios enables product development teams to create repeatable steps and tasks with clear responsibilities. This standardization reduces confusion, ensures consistency, and enhances operational efficiency.

Automation and Efficiency

Koios facilitates automation of repetitive tasks, boosting efficiency in operations. For example, at StreetEasy, Koios automatically triggers data collection processes to address missing information about Real Estate partners, streamlining workflows and achieving organizational goals.

Transparency and Visibility

The graphical admin interface of Koios provides transparency and visibility into all workflows, eliminating the need for extensive coding knowledge. Stakeholders can easily comprehend business processes and workflows in development or production environments, enabling informed decision-making and effective collaboration.

Collaboration and Communication

Koios’ admin interface promotes collaboration by documenting workflow versions and ownership, fostering better communication and feedback among stakeholders. This feature enhances cross-collaboration and communication, addressing challenges related to ownership and documentation within organizations.

Data and Analytics

Koios is planning to integrate A/B testing capabilities, allowing stakeholders to run multiple production workflows, capture data, and generate analytics on user experiences. This data-driven approach empowers stakeholders to gain insights, identify areas for improvement, and optimize workflows for continuously enhanced outcomes.

Looking ahead

Looking forward, StreetEasy’s engineering team is committed to further enhancing Koios and delivering exceptional reliability, stability, management ability, performance, and value to our customers. Our roadmap includes integrating AI capabilities into Koios in order to enhance efficiency and drive dynamic workflow generation.

We envision AI playing a pivotal role in making workflows more adaptive and responsive to user needs. Our goal is to unlock new opportunities for innovation and automation within Koios; to this end, we are collaborating with other internal Zillow AI initiatives. This strategic integration of AI technologies will enable us to stay at the forefront of cutting-edge solutions and provide unparalleled experiences for our users. Stay tuned as we embark on this exciting journey of AI integration with Koios.

Acknowledgments

A special thanks to Charlie Schmidt, Frank Martinez, Eric Proulx, Grant Fraley and the extended StreetEasy engineering team for their invaluable contributions, unwavering support, and continuous efforts in building and enhancing the Koios project. Your dedication and expertise have been instrumental in the success of this project.

StreetEasy is an assumed name of Zillow, Inc. which has a real estate brokerage license in all 50 states and D.C. See real estate licenses.