Vocus: Unified Customer Self-Service

UX Director — led vision, roadmap, and release readiness.

Unified self-service platform End-to-end UX vision & roadmap Design system foundations Reduced support dependency Scaled UX team leadership

Project Overview

  • Client: Vocus
  • Role: Director of User Experience
  • Timeline: 02/2011 – 01/2013
  • Team: Scaled from solo UX lead to 4 designers, 5 product owners, and engineering partners.

Tools & Methods

  • User-Centered Design
  • Journey Mapping & Information Architecture
  • Interaction Design & Rapid Prototyping
  • Accessibility & Design System Integration
  • Collaboration Workshops & Stakeholder Alignment
  • Lean UX (two-week discovery–design–validate sprints)

Challenge

  • Fragmented self-service across multiple legacy portals created duplicated knowledge bases and inconsistent user patterns.
  • Customers struggled to locate answers, often escalating to Support within minutes of search failure.
  • Lacked unified analytics or KPIs to measure adoption and guide content improvements.

Understanding how users searched, failed, and escalated informed a new model for unified self-service content and measurable engagement.

Photo of hand-drawn persona sketches and notes from a product workshop, showing named characters and customer goals.

Collaborative persona workshop with product teams translating customer insights into early character sketches.

Photo of a hand-drawn funnel diagram on paper showing product trial entry points, labeled circles, and connecting arrows.

Early hand-drawn trial funnel sketch mapping product entry points and conversion paths.

Screenshot of annotated design specification showing interface layouts with numbered callouts and descriptive notes.

Annotated design specifications detailing layout, interactions, and reusable global elements.

Vision & Objectives

  • Create a unified customer experience that empowers users to self-serve with confidence while reducing dependency on live support.
  • Unify access: Consolidate three portals into one seamless self-service platform.
  • Simplify tasks: Streamline key workflows like knowledge lookup, case submission, and account management.
  • Increase adoption: Improve discoverability and trust through consistent navigation and feedback.
  • Build for scale: Establish reusable design patterns and shared analytics for continuous optimization.
  • Empower teams: Create visibility across Product, Support, and Marketing to coordinate the customer journey.

Anchored on clarity, consistency, and measurable outcomes — a foundation that informed later design system initiatives.

Approach

Introduced collaborative frameworks to align product, design, and engineering around measurable customer outcomes.

  • Led co-creation workshops connecting Product, Design, and Engineering around shared goals and measurable outcomes.
  • Facilitated cross-team retrospectives to align roadmap priorities and reduce rework.
  • Established UX research synthesis loops for measurable impact on adoption and retention.
  • Partnered with Product and Engineering to define release readiness and adoption milestones.

Fostered a culture of shared ownership — where clarity, trust, and iteration guided every release.

Screenshot of iContact interface showing sign-up form builder with editable contact fields.

Legacy iContact form builder screen inherited through acquisition.

Screenshot of Vocus dashboard displaying social feed activity, recommendations, and account analytics.

Social dashboard concept showing live monitoring and engagement across multiple channels.

Screenshot of Vocus Marketing Cloud analytics dashboard with social and email performance charts.

Analytics dashboard concept showing unified campaign metrics across social and email.

Transformation

  • Cross-functional silos gave way to collaborative discovery, rapid iteration, and measurable improvement across the self-service experience.
  • Mapped end-to-end user journeys to uncover friction in search, submission, and account flows.
  • Validated navigation and hierarchy through rapid prototype cycles and user benchmarks.
  • Unified design and pattern libraries to ensure consistency, accessibility, and reusability across products.
  • Partnered with engineering to embed accessibility and responsiveness into reusable components.
  • Documented design standards that informed future roadmap prioritization and sustained continuous improvement.

Each sprint produced visible, measurable progress — transforming isolated improvements into a unified, scalable self-service platform.

Outcomes

Unified dashboard | cross-portal integration Global navigation | consistent experience Guided workflows | reduced support dependency Reusable components | scalable design foundation Accessibility | WCAG & responsive parity

Takeaways

  • Co-creation builds clarity: Early collaboration between design, product, and engineering turned alignment into acceleration.
  • Design systems are culture, not tools: Shared language and governance mattered more than components alone.
  • Accessible design scales naturally: Building inclusively early prevented rework and improved quality.
  • Documentation drives momentum: Clear specs and annotated patterns carried progress through team transitions.
  • Vision fuels continuity: Keeping the north star visible ensured every sprint moved toward measurable impact.

Vocus proved that unifying systems isn’t just a design problem — it’s a culture shift. Every project since has built on those same principles: clarity, collaboration, and continuous improvement.