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Design
13 posts about Design. Every summary links to the original.
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Facebook's Julie Zhuo on product design - The Intercom Blog
Julie Zhuo, Facebook’s VP of Product Design, recounts her evolution from engineering intern to leading design for the core Facebook app, including News Feed and the Like button. She defines good design as an experience that is enjoyable, useful, easy, and accessible, noting that adding functionality without increasing complexity is a persistent challenge. There is no fixed ratio of designers to engineers; the ideal mix depends on the stage of achieving product-market fit. Effective design principles should be controversial, as they articulate why a company made a particular choice over alternatives. When competing products offer similar utility and ease, the ultimate differentiator is the emotional response the product evokes in the user.
Clearleft's Andy Budd on designing for users - The Intercom Blog
Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft, discusses why design is a critical differentiator for startups, noting that companies like Slack and Dropbox succeeded through superior user experience rather than being first to market. He advises hiring the best designers you can afford early to solve existential business problems, then bringing in a more junior team to evolve and maintain the product. Consumer expectations for digital design have risen greatly, but startup budgets haven’t kept pace because few designers hold budget-making positions, creating a misalignment. Agile development has a place, but companies must balance it with longer-term systems that make design, technology, and products scalable. For voice-activated interfaces, designers will still need to define decision trees and logic, shifting from graphic design to conversational and personality design, as seen with tools like x.ai’s Amy.
Unflattening design - The Intercom Blog
Design problems are inherently multi-dimensional and require multiple perspectives to understand fully, as a single viewpoint flattens the challenge. The post uses the metaphor of ‘unflattening’ from Nick Sousanis’ graphic novel to argue that designers must break out of habitual, flat viewpoints to see a richer picture. It recommends alternating between open exploration and closed execution, and using techniques like changing context, applying constraints such as mobile-first design which led Uber to strip back to one-button ordering, and zooming in and out on problems to see both details and the big picture. Borrowing mental models from others and externalizing ideas through artifacts like Post-it notes, storyboards, or prototypes helps clear the mind to make room for new insights, as Sousanis explains that recognizing our solitary standpoint is limited. Ultimately, design is a modeling activity that benefits from constantly manipulating and enriching one’s perspective to create better decisions.
Design is a conversation - The Intercom Blog
Conversational interfaces represent the next step in removing abstraction between humans and machines, moving from punch cards to command lines to multitouch and now to dialogue. Bots are software agents that run inside messaging apps, performing tasks like ordering a taxi through simple text commands, and are straightforward to write as simple scripts. This shift is compared to the Web 2.0 API revolution, where bots become a platform for building new user experiences, similar to how APIs transformed websites into services. Designing conversational UIs draws inspiration from interactive fiction and text adventure games, which used branching conversation trees, but the post notes these are only starting points. The post argues that conversation as a user interface creates new opportunities and challenges for designers, with messaging apps becoming the layer through which daily life is conducted, as evidenced by six of the top ten apps being primarily for messaging.
Beware of icebergs - Inside Intercom
The post warns that features like search, rich text editing, and email processing are ‘icebergs’ whose visible simplicity belies weeks of development work. Search requires deciding what to index, whether to segment results, and whether to pre-index, making it far more complex than a text field suggests; frequent search requests often indicate a different need, such as quickly finding a specific user. Rich text editing, even when limited to bold and italics, causes maintenance problems when content moves between app, email, and mobile, and the HTML produced is often poor. Email processing involves two icebergs: detecting when users have read notifications to avoid re-notifying, and handling replies by parsing inbound email with context and signatures. The author recounts a ‘Merge accounts’ button that required six weeks of work and was scrapped, illustrating the hidden cost of seemingly small changes, and advises planning for all cases.
Has visual design fallen flat? - The Intercom Blog
The post surveys the flat design trend of 2013-2014, characterized by flat rectangles, minimal shadows, large photography, bold typography, and slick animations, inspired by iOS 7 and Material Design. It argues that while this minimalist style brings clarity, its ubiquity has created an aesthetic monoculture where many products look indistinguishable, making design a commodity. The author draws a parallel to Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture, warning that repeated simplicity can become lifeless, and cites Jane Jacobs on the value of organic diversity. He speculates that future design diversity may be driven by new technologies, cultural influences from a growing global online population, or a backlash against flatness. The post concludes that flat design may persist but will likely eventually give way to new styles, though it offers no definitive prediction.
On magical software... - Inside Intercom
Product design is a cost-benefit analysis, and software feels magical when it dramatically reduces user effort relative to the value delivered. The post identifies three modern sources of magic: Uber-fication, which reduces repeated tasks to a single tap; eliminating data entry by pulling existing data from external services; and ambient awareness, which delivers insights automatically without user action. Uber-fication requires unbundling complex products into single-purpose apps, as Facebook did with Messenger, and using context-aware defaults based on time, location, and previous actions. Eliminating data entry involves connecting to services like Facebook for friends, email for receipts, or Stripe for revenue, rather than asking users to input information. Ambient awareness means designing systems that push valuable analysis to users, such as Intercom’s daily report on new users and slipping customers, rather than requiring them to log in.
How to hire designers - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that design is fundamentally about how something works, not how it looks, and that hiring based on visual portfolios like Dribbble perpetuates a misunderstanding. The author presents a four-layer design framework: intended outcome, component design, detailed interactions, and visual layer. He asserts that these layers are interdependent and that the best designers excel at one or two while being very good at the others. He advises evaluating candidates against the specific layers needed for the role, noting that a popular Dribbble portfolio only proves graphics software skill and trend awareness, not design ability. The goal is to break the cycle of misunderstanding design education and ensure companies hire designers who can solve real problems.
An Upstanding Brand: How Team Values Influence How We Work
Intercom’s Brand Studio defines core values to guide behavior and decision-making without micromanagement as the team scales. The values answer four fundamental questions about why the team exists, what it does, how it behaves, and how it will succeed, and are written as reflections of who the team wants to be, not platitudes. Key values include building trust through vulnerability and inclusivity, making each other better through accountability and learning from diversity, and loving kind and open-minded people who reject mediocrity and are always kind. The values also emphasize supporting the mission, seeking to understand problems and each other, balancing art and science, and encouraging experimentation with considered risks and acceptance of failure. They are woven into branding, hiring, leveling, process work, and performance reviews to define success in expected behavior, and are intended to be discussed and evolved to help the team do the best work of their careers.
Behind the design work of Building Intercom - The Intercom Blog
For the ‘Building Intercom’ event page, the design team aimed for an ‘unapologetically nerdy’ aesthetic to appeal to engineers without resorting to tired clichés. The author discovered the Hershey fonts, originally created in the 1960s by physicist A.V. Hershey, and revived them into functional font files using FontSelf and then Glyphs for weight variations. A small Python script automated placing outlines into a .glyphs file, and Paper.js enabled interactive vector animations. Testing revealed issues such as event details being overlooked, Paperscript’s JavaScript evaluators forbidden by Intercom’s security team, and poor mobile browser support for Paper.js. The project reinforced the value of taking meaningful risks in design and development, reminding the author that overcoming fear of consequences is part of the work.
The golden mean of design and engineering - The Intercom Blog
The post draws on Aristotle’s golden mean to argue that great products require a balance between design and engineering, not compromise. Engineers naturally focus on functionality and performance, wanting to ship features and increase speed often without customer requests, while designers aim for optimal user flows and catch subtle interaction details. The OAuth implementation exemplifies this, with engineers building the technical side and designers crafting user flows, each pursuing their own self-interest through daily stand-ups and whiteboard sessions rather than compromising. This self-interest, guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand, yields superior products than continual compromise, which leads to mediocrity. The post recommends embedding designers in product teams via a hub-and-spoke model, and leaders trusting their teams to find equilibrium rather than imposing rules.
Design in the age of entanglement - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that product design has entered a fourth era, the age of entanglement, following three earlier phases: augmentation, the PC era, and the web era. The author claims that three overlapping technology trends that made innovation predictable are ending, creating uncertainty. Designers now face a complex web of interconnected ideas, technologies, and systems that no single person can fully grasp. The post advises designers to think in systems, build one thing at a time from the center outward, and observe and iterate based on real-world reactions. It suggests that this uncertainty may be a return to a more natural state, where technology takes its rightfully uncertain place in the world.
Designing our new blog - The Intercom Blog
Intercom invested in its blog by hiring a full-time editor and increasing publishing frequency, but recognized risks such as content calendars forcing lower standards and production focus undermining the insights needed for useful posts. The blog had amassed nearly 200 articles, yet the previous design only allowed reverse chronological browsing, making it hard to find related content. The redesign introduces category pages for six main topics—Business, Customer Success, Design, Engineering, Product Strategy, and Intercom Updates—now in the primary navigation, along with tags for deeper topics like jobs-to-be-done. A search tool was finally added to help readers find specific content, and the design is fully responsive for mobile devices. The redesign, credited to Frantisek Kusovsky with input from Jeff Kriege and implemented by David Barrett and Daniel Husar, aims to improve content discoverability without sacrificing the quality insights that come from doing the work.
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