Creating a New Letter Draft
A Broken Workflow Costing Time and Support Hours
What should have been one of the simplest tasks in Carta — creating a new email draft — had become one of the most painful. Almost every user relied on this entry point, but instead of a two-step flow, it was a bottleneck generating weekly support tickets and requiring developer intervention.
Users couldn’t preview templates, combinations broke without warning, and confusing naming rules left even power users stuck. The friction wasn’t just inconvenient — it was undermining confidence in the platform itself and costing the organization valuable time.
Redesigning the Entry Point to Unlock Efficiency
I set out to reimagine this flow from the ground up, with two goals: remove barriers for everyday users and reduce the organizational drag caused by constant support needs.
To get there, I embedded myself in both Newsroom and Marketing teams — running interviews, surveys, and a card-sorting workshop to understand how they actually thought about templates. Shadowing power users revealed a deeper issue: without visual confirmation, users were often blindsided by errors right before send.
This wasn’t just a design update; it was an opportunity to establish stronger patterns and research methods that could scale across Carta.
Scalable Patterns That Reduce Risk and Errors
The redesign introduced a set of deliberate, user-tested improvements:
Automatic unique naming to eliminate confusion
Visual previews so users could see exactly what they were choosing
Editable, transparent template information always visible in context
Proactive error alerts to prevent failed template combinations
Clear starting choices between blank drafts or pre-set templates
Each solution targeted a recurring point of failure while laying down scalable design patterns for future workflows.
Higher Satisfaction, Fewer Tickets, and Faster Workflows
The results spoke for themselves: this project achieved the highest satisfaction scores of any Carta redesign. Newsroom satisfaction rose by more than 30%, with Marketing teams echoing the positive response.
Support tickets dropped sharply, developers reclaimed hours previously spent on avoidable issues, and both teams experienced faster, smoother email creation.
What started as a “simple” fix turned into a pivotal proof point: that investing in foundational workflows not only eases user pain but also drives measurable business impact. By transforming a source of daily frustration into Carta’s most reliable entry point, we delivered value at every level — from individual users to the entire organization.
