Portfolio: Constant Contact — User experience (UX) design

Constant Contact helps small businesses connect with customers, clients and members through email marketing and other tools. They have a great user experience group.

The work started with by helping to define and conduct a customer visit program. Using what we learned from those interviews, I developed specifications for some new and updated features, working in their agile development environment. One example is the new advanced search feature, which allows customers greater flexibility in finding specific contacts; search results can also be saved for later use.

The design process

An agile design environment is a little different from traditional design, but many of the same activities are required.

Analyze comments from customer visits to see what customers needed. Because users are not designers, they can't always express their needs as design requirements, so this required a lot of analysis.

Work with Product Owners to understand business goals and review design ideas.

Work with engineers to understand any technical limitations.

Test the idea with real users, which included recruiting as well as preparing, running and analyzing the study, followed by updates to the designs.

Present the final design ideas to all of the interested Product Owners.

The search query allows users to specify many fields. The result list shows standard fields plus any extra ones required to match search criteria.