Redesigned Contacts Platform for 1M+ monthly users managing 10B+ records
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.
→ 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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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%.
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.
Redesigned end-to-end experience for viewing and managing lists.
Lists table
Merging lists
Sending email
Export
Delete
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
Redesigned a more portable experience of viewing and editing contacts on different pages throughout the product that feature the contacts table.
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.