Dynamic Lists Redesign

Opportunity

The Dynamic List Builder is a critical tool for Carta’s Marketing and Newsroom teams, but the original experience was complex, difficult and often impossible to navigate (click for a before & after). Our non-technical users found this feature particularly difficult, relying often on our developers for help. This in turn ate up significant amount of engineering time. Logic was buried in nested blocks, queries were hard to scan or edit, and the interface lacked visual consistency with the rest of Carta’s tools. As a result, building lists was incredibly time-consuming, error-prone, and disconnected from the rest of the user experience.

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.

Opportunity

The Dynamic List Builder is a critical tool for Carta’s Marketing and Newsroom teams, but the original experience was complex, difficult and often impossible to navigate (click for a before & after). Our non-technical users found this feature particularly difficult, relying often on our developers for help. This in turn ate up significant amount of engineering time. Logic was buried in nested blocks, queries were hard to scan or edit, and the interface lacked visual consistency with the rest of Carta’s tools. As a result, building lists was incredibly time-consuming, error-prone, and disconnected from the rest of the user experience.

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.

New Features

Summary View

The Summary View feature was created to address a major usability gap: users had no way to see their entire dynamic list at a glance. Building complex queries often meant digging through layers of nested logic, making it difficult to catch errors or understand how conditions were structured. Summary View solved this by offering a clear, high-level overview of the full list logic in one place. It allows users to quickly scan, verify, and navigate their queries with confidence—dramatically improving usability and making list-building more approachable for both technical and non-technical users.

See something that looks off? Clicking the edit button will take the user directly to that area of the list, decreasing the need to go back and sift through lengthy nested logic.

List Details Tab

While far from a flashy feature, the new List Details section gave users an incredibly useful tool - providing clear visibility into how their dynamic lists are used across the entire Carta application. Essential metadata is brought up to the top and users can now see where their dynamic list is used across every email campaign, workflow, or other lists that reference it. This gives the opportunity to assess the impact of changes before editing, decreasing potential costly mistakes. A searchable list of included emails also makes it easy to troubleshoot and validate list membership. This section adds much-needed transparency and supports more confident, informed decision-making. And additionally decreasing reliability on our engineers.

Result

Users are empowered to build lists with confidence. They're able to see and access more relevant information, see where their lists are used across Carta, and troubleshoot with ease. Power users can build more complicated lists, reviewing their logic quickly and easily while part-time users can hop in and grab the information they need in Summary View without worrying about breaking any logic.

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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.

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