PROJECT
Nextdoor's Mentions 2.0
ROLE
Lead Designer
PROJECT
Nextdoor's AI Marketplace Listings
ROLE
Lead Designer
SUMMARY
Improvements to the existing @mention feature to help drive value for local businesses
CHALLENGE
Current @mention and tagging features create friction for both neighbors and businesses. Broken tagging, inaccurate suggestions, and rigid location filters prevent users from accurately connecting with local businesses, while limited visibility and fleeting notifications make it hard for businesses to monitor and respond. These gaps weaken trust and reduce the impact of word-of-mouth on Nextdoor.
PROJECT GOALS
Make it easier and more delightful for neighbors to recommend and engage with local businesses. By driving authentic word-of-mouth, increasing discovery through visits, mentions, and messages, and elevating adoption with clear education and fast, delightful UX, we strengthen trust and connection—bringing Nextdoor’s core value of neighbors helping neighbors to life.
DISCOVERY & RESEARCH
I drew from feedback across users, community managers, QA reports, and firsthand experience. Recurring issues with tagging, visibility, and mention tracking shaped the problem space and guided early design. A major blocker was incorrect data matching and latency, so I prioritized those fixes with engineering while refining the broader UX.
NEIGHBOR → BUSINESS MENTIONS ECOSYSTEM
A thriving local ecosystem where businesses can grow and neighbors can trust
To get this feature to work, we need:
- Education
- Visibility
- Relevance and speed
- Loops
EDUCATION
Many users did not know they could mention a person or business. We added inline prompts and education throughout the app. Additionally we added the @ symbol to the beginning of the name tagged everywhere it shows in the product. An @ mention button was also added in the composer to build visibility.
VIDEO DETAIL
We optimized the video player to maximize the video space while encouraging engagement with the video. We included a swipe to show additional information. Users can send gifts to show love and participate in the conversation with other fans and artists. Because there is so much unique content in the platform, we included a description and additional tags for eaze of search.
VISIBILITY
In addition to adding the @ symbol before the tagged name I created a ‘business card’ supplemental to the mention in the post to allow for more business details to be shown like location. This can grow to surface other relevant things like tags in the future.
RELEVANCE
Worked with engineering to improve the business catalog database so it shows more relevant results like weighting businesses relevant to the post category type, location closest to you and businesses you have may interacted with before (based on internal user signal).
SMART TAGGING
Built a smart tagging system. Since the userbase skewed older and some did not know about tagging, we leveraged our work with 3rd party databases to automatically mention businesses that match like phone numbers, email addresses and more.
We also worked on other experience metrics like type-ahead search result latency time.
IMPACT
Overwhelmingly positive
- Lifted mentions 60%+ y/y in one quarter
- Drove more active businesses
- Resulted in over 30% increase in contacting the business (through dm or the call button
- Praise from local businesses
Future ideas of mine were to celebrate moments for both neighbors and businesses when mentions are made, badging and special notifications.
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