Case study · Constant Contact → Endurance International · UX Research Lead

Building a Research Practice from Zero

Two connected research efforts, years apart, at the same company as it grew from a single product team into a multi-brand portfolio. The first stood up foundational persona research where none existed. The second scaled that same practice into a company-wide customer journey.

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Act One

Persona Definition Research

Context

First dedicated research role at Constant Contact. The UX team was maturing but had no foundational research function, only prior usability testing. Product management asked for a new, more effective convention: the existing persona set had been contracted out, left incomplete, and named things like “Betty the Bead Lady.” It was heavy on demographics and light on insight, and nobody was using it.

The Constant Contact product dashboard at the time this work began.

The Constant Contact product at the time this work began.

Process

Recruited 20–30 users across multiple states for contextual inquiry, using an apprentice-to-mastery model
Ran participant-led, probing field interviews with a consistent note-taking framework
Facilitated a full-team affinity diagramming day to synthesize findings
Ran a recap and empathy workshop with the broader UX team
Landed on a new naming convention by team consensus: behavior-based rather than role-based personas, an early precursor to Jobs-to-be-Done thinking

Affinity diagramming whiteboard from the synthesis day, with framed persona posters on the wall.

Affinity diagramming day, synthesizing field notes into patterns.

An example persona card built around behavior rather than role or demographics.

One of the resulting personas, built around behavior rather than role or demographics.

Outcome

Personas moved from unused to actively adopted: they showed up in kickoff docs, recruitment criteria, and eventually a self-identification mechanic in-product, plus an ongoing site-visit library fed by an intake form. A new “customer outreach” field research function was stood up as a direct result, and the tone around research shifted toward genuine curiosity about users rather than an afterthought.

Badge for the resulting Customer Experience Outreach function.

The badge for the resulting customer outreach function.

Act Two

Strategic Field Research & Journey Mapping

Context

Constant Contact was acquired by Endurance International, a portfolio of brands including HostGator, Bluehost, and Domains.com. UX was centralized, but each business unit still had its own contributors, and there had been no foundational research into what users across the portfolio actually shared. Leadership wanted alignment on a company-wide vision, and centralized UX was tasked with a large-scale, generative customer journey.

Process

Kicked off with stakeholder facilitation: a “Hopes + Fears” dialogue, alignment on data collection goals, and interview training for the PM and designer contributors who would help collect data
Ran an 18-site-visit data collection effort across three offices’ customers, using a standardized intake instrument
Facilitated stakeholder synthesis: frequency and priority scoring, then dot-voting to identify the top two cross-business-unit challenges
Synthesized findings using a “10 second / 1 minute / 10 minute” narrative structure, a technique for telling the same story at three levels of depth
Produced a single unifying journey map spanning the shared customer lifecycle

Blank customer site visit intake form template.

The standardized intake form used across all 18 site visits.

Whiteboard sketch of the synthesis process.

Early synthesis sketching, working toward a shared structure.

Outcome

The map was shared broadly at a company all-hands, printed, and displayed in offices. Each PM got an individual per-phase report tied to their area. It left a lasting practice, not just a one-time deliverable: customer-centric research and design became something teams looked to instead of skipped.

The resulting company-wide customer journey map, showing the emotional arc across the business lifecycle.

The resulting journey map, shared at a company all-hands. Cropped here to the emotional-journey curve; the full map ties in specific customer touchpoints by phase.

Key Decisions

Behavior-based personas, not role-based

The team could have kept demographic-heavy personas and just renamed them. Choosing to redefine personas by behavior instead, an early precursor to Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, is why they actually got used.

A three-depth synthesis structure

Stakeholders needed to consume the same findings at different levels of urgency: a “10 second” headline, a “1 minute” summary, and a “10 minute” deep dive, all from the same underlying data.

Both efforts share a shape: research earns adoption by being built with the people who’ll use it, not delivered to them. Personas and journey maps are only as durable as the process that produced them.