Redesigned Contacts Platform for 1M+ monthly users managing 10B+ records
Constant Contact, Inc. Nov 2018 → Mar 2020 GA Release, 2024 Update
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Constant Contact, Inc. Nov 2018 → Mar 2020 GA Release, 2024 Update
Led UX design for a major overhaul of the contacts management platform serving 650K+ customers and 1M+ monthly active users. Collaborated across three dev teams to deliver a streamlined core experience based on user research and Voice of the Customer feedback.
Results
→ Redesigned Contacts Platform for 1M+ monthly users managing 10B+ records.
→ Led comprehensive redesign through 180+ customer interviews, reducing page complexity 50% and support volume over 70%—delivering $1M+ annual support savings and driving $1.5M+ in ARR growth.
▸ 2024 updated UI using the Rise Design System and react table library.
Overview
The Contacts UI is the second most visited product area on the Constant Contact platform. This isn’t surprising considering that adding contacts, managing them, and organizing target audiences is just as critical as creating content—what good is a well-crafted email or SMS if there are no contacts to receive it?
▸ Before: Contact 2.0 home page annotated with UX gaps and customer feedback.
Problem
The Contacts 2.0 UI became the third-highest customer support cost category by 2018, and an aging tech stack severely limited addressing user experience gaps— time-consuming to navigate, inflexible, and lacking in clarity.
User goals
Securely store valuable contact data
High Return on Time Investment (ROTI) — save time and efficiently manage contacts with confidence by giving clear context for actions and limitations.
Handle marketing permissions with ease to stay compliant with regional anti-spam and data privacy laws.
Data portability between systems
Business goals
Increase customer trust by addressing longstanding customer support requests.
Reduce customer support volume and associated costs with phone support.
Reduce cost of development and experimentation.
Mitigate business risk caused by aging infrastructure and defects.
My role & contributions
Drove end-to-end UX design process from concept to delivery, creating user flows and interactive prototypes using Figma, Sketch, and Axure RP
Partnered with product and engineering teams to align system architecture with user needs and shape feature roadmap
Directed UX research initiatives and synthesized user feedback data to inform design decisions for 180+ customer interviews across 18 months
Enhanced design system through component definition and documentation of interaction patterns
Ensured quality through systematic testing and detailed specifications for development handoff
Through this work, I established reusable design patterns now used across the platform in Campaign Reporting, Event Management and Segmentation, and created comprehensive documentation that improved development-to-delivery speed by 40%.
Optimizing Information Architecture
We transformed the application's structure around two key user needs:
Seamless Cross-Context Actions. Rather than forcing users to navigate to specific locations for common tasks, we enabled key actions to be performed from any relevant context. This reduced cognitive load and eliminated unnecessary page loads, creating a more fluid user experience.
Persistent User Preferences. We implemented smart view preferences that automatically save and restore each user's working context. This eliminated repetitive setup tasks and allowed users to instantly resume their workflow across sessions.
▸ Early working document: System diagram showing UI components and how they relate to each other. Printed out on a plotter and hung up in our area to facilitate conversations between design, product, and engineering early in the project.
▸ Early concepts: Diagram for contact management views in context Constant Contact platform navigation and pages that would re-use the contact table & profile dialog.
Lists management
Redesigned end-to-end experience for viewing and managing lists.
Lists table
Merging lists
Sending email
Export
Delete
▸ Before: Legacy lists view (2013-18)
▸ After: Redesign list view with context aware primary actions, a clear sub navigation, and dynamic contact insights and expanded inline and bulk table actions. After release we saw a 33% increase in feature discovery for Segments— a feature that had struggled with adoption. (2021 screenshot)
Contact management
Redesigned end-to-end experience for viewing and managing contacts.
Adding and importing contacts
Contacts table
Customize table columns
Contact profile
Searching for contacts
Adding & removing from a list
Managing tags
QuickSend™ an email to a contact
Resubscribing a contact
Exporting contacts
Deleting contacts
▸ Before: Legacy contacts table without table row actions, narrow columns, limited to two pre-configured views, global search only, and limited bulk actions. (2013-18)
▸ After: Redesign the list detail page with back navigation, global actions, custom columns, list-specific search, and expended inline table row action menu. (2021 screenshot)
Contact details
Redesigned a more portable experience of viewing and editing contacts on different pages throughout the product that feature the contacts table.
▸ Before: Legacy contact details page would lose user's previous context making navigation between contacts table, lists, search, and reports very time-intensive. Edit links were often missed and section-based editing resulted in frequent customer support cases for "difficulty editing and managing contacts". (2013-18)
▸ After: Redesign contact profile modal optimized for preserving user context, allowing for seamless navigation between contacts presented on any page in the product. Primary edit CTA and additional actions such as export, resubscribe, and delete from details addressed frequent customer support cases for "difficulty editing and managing contacts". (2021 screenshot)
▸ After: Edit mode contact profile modal gave a dedicated view for customers to modify multiple details, clear cancel & save actions in "sticky header", "discard changes" confirmation (to prevent accidental data loss), and the ability to delete a contact from edit mode addressed frequent customer support cases for "difficulty editing and managing contacts". (2021 screenshot)
Adding and importing contacts
▸ Before: Legacy contacts management "Add Contacts" dropdown, had limited options, lacked enough context to differentiate options, didn't include tools for growing subscribers available in Constant Contact, and couldn't be reused in product areas like onboarding, global navigation or the dashboard. (2013-18)
▸ After: Redesigned global "Add contacts" dialog features methods of importing existing contacts and a series of other Constant Contact lead capture tools to help subscriber growth. After release, we saw a 23% increase in list growth tool adoption. (2021 screenshot)
▸ After: With the redesigned global "Add contacts" dialog we introduced entry points to sign-up forms and to various 3rd-party integrations. After release, we saw a 13% increase 3rd party integrations and a 22% increase in mobile app downloads.
Impact & reflection
The Contacts Platform redesign became one of the most significant UX transformations in Constant Contact's history, delivering $1M+ in annual support savings and $1.5M+ in ARR growth while serving 1M+ monthly active users.
Beyond the metrics, this project established design patterns and components now used across the platform, reducing development time for subsequent features by an estimated 30%. The research insights and documentation created during this 18-month effort continue to inform product decisions years later.
What I learned:
Sustained research over 18 months (180+ interviews) revealed patterns that wouldn't have emerged from shorter studies
Early technical collaboration with three dev teams prevented costly rework and enabled ambitious architectural changes, despite needing to balance two different front-end frameworks and back-end system constraints.
Breaking a massive redesign into phased releases allowed us to validate assumptions and adjust course based on real usage data by participating strategically in roadmapping with Product Management
This project reinforced my belief that the most valuable design work happens at the intersection of user needs, technical constraints, and business strategy.
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