Jeff Wright | UX Design & Product Strategy

The Role

iContact was a leading email marketing platform with thousands of small to mid-sized business customers. Over the course of three years, I lead the user experience and marketing creative teams. In that time we re-skinned the entire application, remade the visual marketing, and completely redesigned iContact's signature feature set, MessageBuilder™.

Results

iContact was acquired by Vocus, Inc. in 2012 for $167 million.

The Team

iContact had an amazing team of user experience and design professionals. They had the right mix of specialties, the right personalities, and a complete focus on iContact's users. But iContact was a rapidly-growing company, and in the time I was there, its growth outpaced its processes. UX was stuck in an Agile process under the technology organization that required its team members to be independent generalists and allowed no time for testing.

With support from throughout the organization, I moved UX from technology to product, and remade our process so that we worked together on every project. This allowed team members to function as specialists—designers, researchers, writers—and gave us each a voice in the design of everything that we did. Our whiteboard sessions became famous inside the organization, and always reserved a chair for any stakeholder from any department that wanted to sit in.

Usability Testing

Our team had excellent researchers, who were adept at discovering and reporting important nuance about each of our user personas—all before I ever arrived in my role. But the organization was not adept at putting that information to use, or in providing the time to obtain it. As a result, the excellent data we had was too often unused or out of date.

With the help of our researchers, I led a new process where we'd test every two weeks, regardless of other pressures, and issue a short digestible report on the most noteworthy learnings. We posted our reports for all to see, with large fonts and big, digestible take-aways. Of course, we had to do this without permission, so I financed the first few rounds of incentives for participants out of my own pocket.

But in short order, our testing regimen became a staple at iContact. Our CEO looked forward to each new report, and "testing" became a ubiquitous element of every product production cycle. In fact, in 2011, when we launched our signature MessageBuilder™ product, our testing was able to accurately predict customer support issues on day one of deployment. The company expected a huge uptick in confused and bug-ridden customer complaints, but there was none. A minor investment in regular, repeated testing anticipated the problems our users might have, addressed them before launch, and/or told support representatives exactly what to expect.

User Interface and Marketing

The work below was designed by my team during my time at iContact. I take credit only for creating an environment, fostering a process, and providing whatever meager coaching I could that allowed our great designers to do their best work.