ContactMax

Problem Background

As our work environments have become more remote, it is more important than ever that we find better ways to stay connected and build our professional relationships. While technology like LinkedIn has made it easier to meet new professional contacts, it is left to each person to maintain and nurture those relationships to help reach their goals, whether that be to obtain a new job or deepen their network within their current field. 

LinkedIn Newsroom reported that 80% of professionals believe you can elevate your career success through professional networking. 

In fact, at least 70% of people got their current job through networking (Source: Payscale). But where do you start? How do you manage and grow your business relationships?

That’s why we created ContactMax. An app that empowers young professionals to organize and grow their business relationships to reach certain goals and become super networkers in the process.

‍

Research Insights

To learn more about the problem, we first conducted a survey and interviewed three people in depth to gain a deeper understanding of how young professionals currently manage and grow their business relationships. Of our 30+ survey respondents, we found that over 80% of them were currently taking steps to grow their network. Through both the survey and the interviews, we uncovered multiple insights.

• While people find expanding their network important, they don’t know how to go about keeping track of business contacts
• Contacts get easily lost or forgotten due to no system 
• It is difficult to remember details about each contact 
• Many people find it difficult to keep in touch and stay up to date with contacts

‍

Solution Explanation

Our solution, ContactMax, is an app that will empower young professionals to easily keep track and organize their business contacts. Our long term vision of the product will allow users to sync phone, email and LinkedIn contacts to create a hub where they can organize and retain details about each contact, track their activity, measure the success of each relationship, and learn personalized strategies to grow their network. 

To determine our MVP, we prioritized our features based on impact and effort and opted to move forward with 3 initial features:

• Syncing or manually adding contacts - This will allow users to quickly add phone contacts and additional information like job details or how you met someone.
• Adding reminders - This is the first step to nurturing business relationships. This feature will allow users to set reminders and help hold themselves accountable to reach out to contacts at a certain time to help progress the relationship.
• Organizing by tags - This will allow users to group and find related contacts quickly and efficiently.

‍

Lofi & Hifi Mockups

Iterative Design Learnings

After creating our high fidelity prototype, we tested on 5 participants to gain feedback on the overall usability of ContactMax. From the testing sessions, we learned that:

• The purpose of tags was not clear and would most likely not be utilized as often as reminders unless the user had a large network
• When users were creating reminders, the ‘Form of Communication’ field was interpreted in different ways
• Users found it difficult to find the full details of contacts
• Most users stated that they would most likely not sync contacts when first going through onboarding for privacy reasons
• Users want to be able to access all details of a particular contact in each reminder

Moving forward, we will be iterating on our designs to alleviate these issues and continue to test our product to ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience for all of our users.

‍

Implementation Details 

Where is it hosted? 

‍The backend is currently hosted on AWS using EC2 instance. It has a certificate attached to the url and using a load balancer from AWS. This is the endpoint of the backend https://contactmax.renderhelp.click/health. The code resides in GitHub. 

What is your tech stack?

The backend technologies include Golang and MongoDB while the mobile app is designed using Flutter, which mainly uses Dart as the programming language. The user details are stored in MongoDB.

High level journey of a request

One of the main challenges we countered was how to test the mobile application without deploying it on the App store yet since it is still under development. We are able to test it on our individual MacBook, but we also need other members of the team to be able to test as well.

We didn't have any scaling issues while developing the app. The app was deployed on AWS with a lot of resources.

As next steps, we will need to figure out how to test the app in the future during development and setting up a development environment with other members of the team. 

‍

Future Steps

We will be continuing to work on ContactMax following our time at Co.Lab, with the hope to release it in the App store in the upcoming months.

We have received great feedback so far and will continue to iterate our designs to ensure we release the best product for our users.