What

Turn Luca AI’s plain-text push emails into a scannable, color-coded notification system that gets founders from their inbox to a decision at a glance.

Context

Luca AI sends two kinds of push email: a short Insight, and a Weekly Business Report carrying four insights, week-on-week metrics and a Business Health Snapshot PDF charting the same metrics over a year. Both were near-plain-text messages with a single button: every line the same size, no headings, and color coding too faint to register. The information meant to bring founders back into the product read like spam, and was the easiest thing in the inbox to ignore.

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The originals, shown with sample data

Constraints

1. Built on the existing mailing system. I worked outward from what the backend engineers had already implemented, so every component had to be something the system could actually send.
2. No design system to inherit. Luca had a handful of hex codes and nothing else, so I first set down a basic system — color, type and spacing — and built every email component from scratch on top of it, staying true to a brand that was already live.
3. All of the content had to stay. Four insights, seven week-on-week metrics and the Business Health Snapshot are what the report is for; the redesign could reorganize them, not cut them.
4. An 8-hour time difference. With a UK-based team, most of the collaboration happened asynchronously, through recordings, notes and daily updates.
5. No access to users. US clients did not respond to interview requests, and the time difference made sessions with EU clients hard to schedule, so the redesign rests on the existing emails and reasoning rather than on interviews.

Key Features

1. Origin at a glance

   The Luca logo and an email-type label open every message, so a reader knows what it is before reading a word.

2. A contained headline

   The headline and a short description sit in their own lighter card, set apart from everything below.

3. Metrics in pairs

   Two metric cards side by side, so a number arrives with a related or contrasting figure that gives it context.

4. A suggestion, not just a problem

   Each insight ends with a short proposed fix, and one button into Luca for the full breakdown.

5. Color-coded insights

   The weekly report’s four insights are coded by tone, so good news and warnings separate before they are read.

6. The CTA above the fold

   The main call to action moved up beside the headline summary, visible without scrolling.

7. Metrics as cards

   The week-on-week metrics became a grid of cards instead of a plain-text list, with the Business Health Snapshot kept.

8. Three ways in

   Separate buttons open a Luca conversation on the insight, the metrics or the solution — three angles on one report.

Final Deliverable

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Reflection

Designing inside a system that already existed made the backend engineers my first users: grounding every idea in what the mailer could already send is what let the redesign ship, rather than stall as a concept. Using Claude to generate quick mockups let me test components before committing to them, and kept my focus on general design decision making over individual pixels.

What I would do differently is find stand-in users rather than wait on Luca’s own. I would network my way to founders of small eCommerce companies — the market Luca is built for, and the kind of business its current users run — and test the emails with them before committing to a layout. As it stands, the “digestible at a glance” principle rests on reasoning more than on research; now that the system is live, open and click-through rates are the evidence I would want to see.

The foundation these emails were built on covered little beyond color, type and spacing. I am currently taking an advanced interaction design class where we build a design system from the ground up for a brand and applying said learning to future projects