Dynamic Lists Redesign

Empowering Teams with Intuitive Audience Segmentation

Empowering Teams with Intuitive Audience Segmentation

When Building a List Becomes a Daily Struggle

The Dynamic List Builder is a critical tool for Carta's Marketing and Newsroom teams, enabling targeted campaigns that reach millions of readers. But the original interface was a daily source of friction.

Non-technical users struggled with a complex, unintuitive interface. Experienced users wrestled with nested logic that was difficult to scan. Without previews or visibility into how lists impacted other campaigns, teams faced the risk of costly mistakes. Routine tasks required developer intervention, slowing workflows and diverting resources from strategic work.

It was clear: the tool was undercutting productivity and creating organizational risk. The challenge was to redesign it in a way that empowered all users — from occasional team members to power users — while reducing reliance on engineering support.

Building a Foundation for Smarter Campaign Targeting

To tackle this challenge, I went beyond traditional surveys. I shadowed users, ran workshops across teams, and interviewed key stakeholders — including the Manager of Email Retention and Analytics and Carta's engineering team — to understand both technical constraints and business needs.

This research uncovered a crucial insight: even seasoned users struggled to understand query logic and its downstream effects. Without a way to preview queries or see list usage across campaigns, errors were frequent and workflows inefficient. These findings became the blueprint for the redesign, guiding us toward features that would directly address the pain points.

When Building a List Becomes a Daily Struggle

The Dynamic List Builder is a critical tool for Carta's Marketing and Newsroom teams, enabling targeted campaigns that reach millions of readers. But the original interface was a daily source of friction.

Non-technical users struggled with a complex, unintuitive interface. Experienced users wrestled with nested logic that was difficult to scan. Without previews or visibility into how lists impacted other campaigns, teams faced the risk of costly mistakes. Routine tasks required developer intervention, slowing workflows and diverting resources from strategic work.

It was clear: the tool was undercutting productivity and creating organizational risk. The challenge was to redesign it in a way that empowered all users — from occasional team members to power users — while reducing reliance on engineering support.

Building a Foundation for Smarter Campaign Targeting

To tackle this challenge, I went beyond traditional surveys. I shadowed users, ran workshops across teams, and interviewed key stakeholders — including the Manager of Email Retention and Analytics and Carta's engineering team — to understand both technical constraints and business needs.

This research uncovered a crucial insight: even seasoned users struggled to understand query logic and its downstream effects. Without a way to preview queries or see list usage across campaigns, errors were frequent and workflows inefficient. These findings became the blueprint for the redesign, guiding us toward features that would directly address the pain points.

Clarity and Transparency That Put Users in Control

Summary View

Complex queries often meant digging through layers of nested logic. Summary View addressed this by offering a high-level overview of the full list structure, allowing users to quickly scan, verify, and navigate queries. When users spotted an issue, they could jump directly to the relevant section, dramatically reducing time spent troubleshooting.

List Details Tab

To improve transparency, the List Details Tab showed exactly where each list was used across campaigns, workflows, and other lists. Users could assess the impact of changes before editing, troubleshoot efficiently, and validate membership data — all without needing engineering support.

Together, these features gave teams visibility, confidence, and control over their audience segmentation workflows.

Smarter Segmentation, Stronger Campaigns, and Less Reliance on Engineering

The results of the redesign were immediate and measurable:

  • Users could access relevant information without help from engineering

  • Complex logic could be reviewed quickly via Summary View

  • Clear visibility into list usage reduced risk of unintended impacts

  • Both power users and occasional users could work independently and efficiently

By streamlining workflows and reducing reliance on engineering, the Dynamic List Builder became not only more intuitive but also more strategically valuable. Teams could focus on creating precise, effective campaigns instead of troubleshooting interface issues — leading to faster, more accurate audience segmentation and stronger business outcomes.

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Approach

When I took on this project, I knew it was no small undertaking. Our users had been unhappy with this feature for years and relied heavily on complicated workarounds and developer help in building dynamic lists. While this project came with lengthy survey data from our Marketing and Newsroom teams, I also made a point to conduct my own user interviews. I shadowed Marketing and Newsroom power users, new users and folks who only had to hop into the tool on occasion. In addition, I interviewed our Manager of Email Retention and Analytics, as well as the developers on the Carta team who were on call when our users needed help. I wanted a 360º view of every pain point, which aspects of the feature were critical and of highest priority, as well as taking note of any aspects that no longer served our users.

In addition, I held workshops to surface overlap among teams when it came to workarounds, pain points, and confusion. Every team at The Post had different needs for their dynamic lists, but every team had one thing in common: massive frustration.

Through my research, I found even the most experienced users relied on workarounds and struggled to troubleshoot issues. There was no quick way to preview queries or understand how a list impacted other campaigns, adding unnecessary friction to daily workflows. One mistake could affect millions of readers and subscribers. I set out to redesign the experience to be more intuitive, readable, and aligned with how users actually work. Adding a couple new features, removing irrelevant data, and creating a new and improved interface.