UX CASE STUDY — 03
contact organization and segmentation: encouraging users to stay on our platform and activate on their data
ROLE
Lead designer
DURATION
January 2025- May 2025
DISCIPLINES
Organizational Methods
Information architecture
User research
Most mailchimp customers start with shallow data — 70% of contacts arrive through static imports, and more than half of customer files contain three fields or fewer. From there, we had an outdated organizational model that no longer resonated with customers: tags, groups, and segments overlapped in customers' minds, and without a clear system, they would build workarounds outside mailchimp entirely — maintaining their real database elsewhere and importing static lists instead of using native segmentation.
my role
On our 0-to-1 Mailchimp-native CRM, I made a deliberate call against the obvious move: most of our customers didn't need advanced segmentation yet, and building it first would have solved a problem they didn't have. Research across both Mailchimp and QuickBooks customers pointed to a smaller, real need instead — a fast way to filter their contact list — that could double as the on-ramp to segmentation once they were ready for it.
I designed and shipped that experience end-to-end across both products. It was a heavily requested feature and saw heavy usage after launch — validating not just the design, but the sequencing bet: that meeting customers where they were would move them toward the bigger vision faster than handing them power they weren't asking for.
01 - overview
the problem
research surfaced a problem stack, not a single pain point:
data enters shallow and stays shallow. 70% of contact data comes in through static imports, and 56% of customer files have three columns or fewer (first name, last name, email) — most customers start with the bare minimum.
customers built workarounds instead of using the product. because updating imported data meant going back to the source and re-importing, customers kept their real database elsewhere and brought in each new audience as a static, one-off list — segmentation was happening outside mailchimp entirely.
the organizational model itself lacked a shared vocabulary. tags, groups, and segments overlapped in customers' mental models, and customers regularly tried to use static tools (tags) to do dynamic jobs (segmentation) — a mismatch between how the system was designed and how customers actually understood it.
the cost was measurable. 44% of churned customers cited lack of integration as a reason for leaving, and customers with a connected social integration showed ~10% higher 12-month retention than those without.
vision for contact organization with predicted segments and saved segments
02 — the approach
we needed to prioritize and triangulate a real problem to solve before boiling the ocean
given the complexities in how our data was stored and structured, we needed to prioritize a slice of the problem to learn and progressively grow from
x% of segments were used only once
through our data, we could see that customers did not understand how segmentation worked and the best way to utilize it by the fact that they would send a campaign to a single segment and never use that segment again. but we knew that our segmentation builder was confusing and difficult to use
03 — process
hypothesis
if we meet customers where they are and allow them to filter down their lists first and then adopt the segmentation feature later as they learn, then maybe they will stick around for longer and stay in our product instead of exporting and taking their data elsewhere
What's the simplest version of this experience?
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iterations
Selected iterations
Selected iterations
04 — validation
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05 — outcome
shipped
this feature shipped in 2025 and was heavily adopted quickly by our customers . we saw an uptick in usage of the saved segments feature. my dream and vision was to use the data that we could gather on our customers who were saving filters as segments and leverage our data science team to predict which segments were most valuable to our customers at different stages of their experience