Themes & Styles: from 3% to 28% adoption

Themes & Styles had been in Lucidchart for years but had never found product-market fit. Pre-launch analytics showed only ~3% of weekly active users had ever interacted with the feature. Stakeholders across the org had different opinions on why: some thought the UI was wrong, others thought it needed more themes, others assumed users just didn't care about visual polish.

The project (internally codenamed "GUT") was in a difficult state when my team — another designer, a PM, and I — were assigned to it. It took a full year to turn around. Four problems compounded: stakeholders had conflicting priorities focused on individual features rather than user intents; prior approaches relied heavily on subjective opinions rather than evidence-based insights; testing had been limited to mocks, which didn't reflect how users actually interacted with the product; and the existing proposal had themes riding on top of Conditional Formatting, a system most users found confusing.

Compounding this: the previous solution failed to integrate with existing formatting systems and lacked plans for compatibility with legacy systems. Whatever we shipped had to live alongside Conditional Formatting, theme color overrides, and the formatting bar — without breaking documents that pre-dated the new system.

The research handed us permission to make two hard calls. First: scope down the feature, drop the "configure a custom theme" workflows, and prioritize a small library of curated themes that could be applied with one click. Second, and harder: move themes off Conditional Formatting entirely. Leadership had been steering toward a model where themes were a kind of CF rule. I led an in-depth analysis of CF's usability problems and used it to convince leadership to adopt a simpler, separate mechanism for applying themes.

I worked with my PM to advocate this scope reduction to leadership. We proposed Corporate Themes (a constrained, brand-aligned set) over a more open Insights-based direction another track had been exploring. Our proposal — backed by interview data — was eventually accepted as the well-thought-out direction. An early test of an updated "Chalk" theme attracted 150K distinct monthly users, signalling the direction was right before we committed the rest of the system.

I separated system-design discussions from visual-design feedback. Themes were designed using the brand palette with high-contrast, accessible options. Stakeholder reviews focused on usability mechanics first; aesthetic feedback was deferred until the system worked.

The styling primitive — a "style" that bundles fill, stroke, and text properties into a single applicable unit — was designed to be reusable. It needed to work for:

I created mocks demonstrating how the same style primitive could scale across other products and features in the suite, ensuring the design wasn't just a Lucidchart fix but a sustainable foundation for the broader platform.

With themes shipped on their own simpler mechanism, I came back to Conditional Formatting — the data-driven counterpart we had decoupled from earlier — and led its redesign on the same primitive. Previously, CF rules used a separate visual vocabulary: icons, progress bars, color overrides applied directly to shapes. Users who wanted a visual change could either format it manually or write a CF rule, and the two paths produced different-looking results.

The redesign let CF rules apply styles — the same primitive used in manual formatting. A rule could say "if status = blocked, apply the 'red alert' style," and the rendered shape was indistinguishable from a shape someone styled by hand.

The redesign was validated with 2 SMEs and 5 users. Although the broader CF revamp project was eventually deprioritized in favor of other initiatives, the styling integration shipped:

Beacon tracking surfaced an early adoption blocker: usage of the "edit styles" feature was unexpectedly low because users didn't know it existed. I designed and implemented an onboarding flow that surfaced the feature contextually, and daily usage doubled.

The longer-term win was strategic. Themes & Styles became the visual foundation that other features could build on rather than re-invent. The CF redesign was the first proof of that — but the same styling primitive now underpins how visual identity is applied across the document, regardless of whether it's user-driven or data-driven.

The hardest design decision was scope. Themes & Styles had a long backlog of "nice-to-have" capabilities — custom palettes, theme marketplaces, per-team libraries. The user research was clear that none of those mattered until the one-click case worked. Saying "no" to the larger vision in MVP was what allowed the one-click case to ship cleanly.

The CF redesign taught me to look for shared primitives across features that look different on the surface. CF and manual formatting felt like separate problems for years; they were actually the same problem with different inputs. Designing around that shared model — rather than two parallel UIs — collapsed a lot of complexity.

The biggest organizational lesson: communication artifacts matter more than design artifacts in projects this size. Loom videos, decision logs, flowcharts, and Slack-context-setting did more to keep stakeholders aligned than any prototype. Mentoring my co-designer Dev to do the same — and to read which level of detail a specific stakeholder needed — was as much of the project as the interaction design.