Top Contacts on the Employees tab

A ZoomInfo project to make the Employees tab on a company profile useful for prospecting on its own, instead of being a place users glanced at before jumping to Advanced Search. I led the design side, working with a junior designer who ran most of the execution, with a PM.

When a salesperson in ZoomInfo Sales is researching a company, the Employees tab on that company's profile is one of the main places they land. It's where they try to figure out who to reach out to at the account.

In practice, the tab wasn't doing much of that job. The default view was a list of Buying Group members, which is a ZoomInfo concept for a default "here are the likely decision makers" set. Users often found that set confusing or incomplete, so they'd try to clear the filter, except the Buying Group filter couldn't be cleared on this tab. It was always on.

On top of that, the filters users actually wanted (job title, department, management level, location, opportunity stage) weren't available directly on the tab. They were only in Advanced Search. So what happened most of the time was this: a user opened the Employees tab, found the Buying Group list didn't answer their question, clicked through to Advanced Search to do the real filtering there, and never came back. The company profile became a launchpad to Advanced Search instead of a place where a salesperson could actually decide who to contact.

A PM flagged the pattern in analytics. We wanted the Employees tab to do more of the prospecting work itself, so users didn't have to bounce to another tool for basic filtering.

Before sketching anything, the junior designer led a pre-design learning round so we'd know what users actually did on the Employees tab and what filters they actually used. She ran user interviews and a competitor scan, and I reviewed and refined with her as she went.

A few findings shaped the rest of the project. Users mostly relied on a small set of filters: job title, management level, department, and location. Opportunity stage (pulled from their CRM) mattered too, because users adjusted who they targeted based on deal stage: lower management when a deal was early, C-level when it was late. Users looked for a small number of contacts per account, around 5 to 10, not a full list. And the specific values they applied varied by firmographics: C-level at small companies but directors at large ones, and different titles depending on industry.

Power users went further. They cross-referenced ZoomInfo contacts against LinkedIn to validate, kept track of who they'd already talked to versus who they still needed to reach, and pulled in external signals (an earnings call mentioning store expansion, for example) to pick who to contact next.

On Buying Group specifically: users often felt the default set didn't surface all the relevant contacts for their deal. They'd do manual searching to fill gaps, which led right back to the Advanced Search detour we were trying to remove.

The competitor scan covered Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 6sense, DemandBase, Seamless, and CommonRoom. The pattern that kept showing up: personalized contact recommendations, simple layouts with enough data to decide quickly, and engagement signals on the contacts themselves. That matched what the interviews were telling us.

With the research in hand, we pulled the design team into a Crazy 8 session to widen the pool of ideas before we committed to a direction.

Each designer sketched 8 ideas in 8 minutes on their own. We presented and voted on the strongest ones, then each person did a more detailed sketch of the top-voted concept and we voted again. We used those sketches as the starting point for the concepts we explored afterward.

The point wasn't to land on a final design in a day. It was to pressure-test our own thinking against other designers' ideas before we narrowed down.

A few directions came out of the Crazy 8 round and the research. The junior designer ran with most of them and I reviewed and gave direction along the way.

Advanced-Search-like Employees tab

The first direction was the most literal answer to the problem. If users kept bouncing to Advanced Search for the filters they needed, bring Advanced Search to the Employees tab. We put a filter panel on the left, the same left pane from Advanced Search, trimmed to only the filters relevant to this context (job title, department, management level, location, likely to engage, etc.).

It solved the missing-filters problem by essentially turning the Employees tab into a smaller Advanced Search. The concern was that it didn't really change the relationship between the two surfaces. Users would still be doing the same kind of search work here, just in a more scoped way. And it made the tab visually heavy in a place where users had come to research one company, not to run a full search.

Grid view with quick filters on the right

The second direction was more structural. The Employees tab already had two widgets that linked out to Advanced Search: a Management Level row (Contacts, C-Level, VP-Level, Director, Manager, Non-Manager) and an Employees by Department donut. Both redirected to Advanced Search with the relevant filter applied.

In this concept, we replaced those links with quick filters on the right side of the page that activated filter chips above the table. Clicking "C-Level" in the right rail would apply the C-level filter inline, instead of kicking users out to another tool. We also switched the table from the existing card view to a grid, so we could fit more per contact. The pre-design research had shown users wanted columns like contact info, status (in/out of CRM, engaged), and location side by side so they could make faster decisions.

This one did more to change how the page behaved, but it also touched more things at once: the widgets, the card-to-grid shift, the quick filters, and the new filters. A bigger bet, and a larger disruption for users who were already comfortable with the existing workflow.

For the initial release we decided to ship a smaller, lower-risk version instead of either of the concepts above. The shipped design did three things.

First, we removed the Buying Group default filter. Users could now see other contacts at the company without being forced through a Buying Group lens first.

Second, we added a "Recommended" quick filter, which became the new default. It surfaced a short, curated set of contacts tailored to the user, based on a model the engineering team built that learned from the user's past activity in ZoomInfo. I don't know the details of the algorithm, but the product logic was roughly that if a user had been engaging C-level contacts in marketing companies, Recommended would prioritize similar profiles for the company they were viewing. The goal was to give users a short list they could act on without having to filter their way there.

Third, we added the filters users had been missing: job title, department, management level, location, and more. All of them sat in the quick filter bar above the table, so users didn't have to jump to Advanced Search to use them.

We deliberately kept the Management Level row and the Employees by Department donut as-is, even though both still linked out to Advanced Search. A lot of users already had this as their workflow: click a management level, land in Advanced Search with filters pre-applied. Ripping that out for a first release would have disrupted people who weren't asking us to disrupt them.

To make sure those users still noticed the new filters before they clicked away, we added an intro popover on the Recommended chip for first visit. Small, dismissable, positioned where users would see it before they navigated to a department link or to Advanced Search.

Alongside this release, other teams were reworking the company profile page. Overview info was moving to a left rail, and the currently selected tab (Overview, Employees, and so on) was getting more horizontal room.

We sketched out what a longer-term version of the Employees tab could look like inside that new layout. It picked up the ideas from the grid concept: a grid view for contacts, quick filters above the table, and Recommended as the anchor. The Management Level and Department widgets moved below the fold, still there for users who wanted them, but not competing for attention with the contacts that mattered right now.

The bet behind this version is that if Recommended plus filters give users enough to act on, most of them won't need to scroll down to the widgets or click out to Advanced Search at all. The widgets become an escape hatch instead of the main path. That's a bet we hadn't tested yet, and one that depends on how well the Recommended model actually performs for real users, which is something you can only learn in production.

I don't have numbers for this one. I went on paternity leave before the release reached customers, so I know what we designed for but not how customers actually responded to it.

The KPIs the PM set were more usage of Top Contacts (copying contacts, exporting, acting on them), less time jumping to Advanced Search for basic filtering, and more engagement on contacts in large companies, where finding the right person is hardest.

Looking back, the part I'm most glad we got right is what we didn't ship. The team's instinct was to rebuild the tab end-to-end: move widgets, switch to a grid, replace the card view, redo everything at once. Crazy 8 surfaced plenty of bigger swings. We landed on the smaller release instead, which kept the parts of the workflow users already relied on (the Management Level row, the Department donut, the link-out to Advanced Search for power users) and removed the biggest sources of day-to-day friction (the Buying Group default and the missing filters). The future-direction sketch exists precisely so the next iteration has a target to aim at, assuming Recommended performs well enough to retire the old widgets.

On the collaboration: most of the execution was the junior designer's. My job was to make sure the research was pulling its weight, to push back when a concept was solving the wrong problem, and to jump in on specific screens when we hit time pressure. That's the part of senior design work I enjoy most, and this was a good project to do it on.