--- title: "Design Process" description: "7 posts about Design Process, summarised, each linking to the original." --- # Design Process > 7 posts about Design Process, summarised, each linking to the original. ## Articles ### [Podcast: Margaret Gould Stewart on designing at scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/podcast-margaret-gould-stewart-on-designing-at-scale.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 13, 2026 - Type: Explainer Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s Director of Product Design, discusses the challenge of designing products for over a billion users, citing Google Search, YouTube, and Facebook as examples of universal human needs. She emphasizes balancing audacity with humility, taking oneself out of the design process to focus on user needs. User research remains critical, using both quantitative data and ethnographic studies across different cultures and regions, with products tested extensively before release. For business products, usability must come before beauty, but delight on top of a usable foundation is powerful, as seen in consumer expectations. Stewart also highlights the importance of diverse teams and inclusive hiring programs like Facebook University to better represent the global user base. ### [Is asking why always the best strategy? - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/is-asking-why-always-the-best-strategy-the-intercom-blog.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 13, 2026 - Type: Explainer The post argues that asking ‘why’ repeatedly in product design interviews is not always the best strategy because digging too quickly to the deepest reason can miss valuable insights. Instead, the author recommends exploring three productive layers: usefulness (what the tool does), usability (the result of using it), and desirability (the emotional outcome), each revealing different design opportunities. For example, with an electric drill, the usefulness layer suggests power and speed settings, the usability layer suggests lighter weight and prescriptive settings, and the desirability layer suggests a docking station or attractive design. The author cautions that going beyond these three layers, such as asking why a more personal home matters, becomes too abstract and rarely actionable for product design. Taking time to explore each layer thoroughly yields more actionable and interesting insights than rushing to the root cause. ### [How we redesigned our blog, Inside Intercom - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-redesigned-our-blog-inside-intercom-the-intercom-blog.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 8, 2026 - Type: Problem & solution Intercom redesigned its blog, Inside Intercom, because the volume of articles, podcasts, books, and videos had outpaced the old design’s ability to help readers discover and consume content. The new homepage employs a magazine-like hierarchy on a solid grid, featuring a lead article with secondary and tertiary items, while podcasts now have their own category with an inline player for seamless listening. Two new categories for Startups and Marketing, along with reading enhancements like estimated reading times and progress bars and the removal of the pop-up newsletter signup, improve the user experience. Typography pairs Tiempos serif with Akkurat Pro sans-serif to create an editorial feel, and custom illustrations by a diverse range of artists plus hand-painted author portraits by Jon Stich add a personal touch. The redesign, led by designer Maria Gonzalez and developer Daniel Husar, aims to make content discovery simpler and reflects Intercom’s design-led culture. ### [Designing Features Using Job Stories - Inside Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/post/designing-features-using-job-stories-inside-intercom.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 8, 2026 - Type: Explainer Personas rely on demographic attributes that fail to explain causality behind consumption, and User Stories couple implementation with motivations, obscuring reasons for feature failure. Job Stories overcome this by focusing on the situation, motivation, and desired outcome without prescribing a solution. A case study demonstrates the approach: designing a profile page for a car loan application, using a five-step process starting with the high-level job of helping salespeople secure loans. The team observed customers currently rely on physical proximity to assess trust, and wrote a Job Story about anxiety of sharing sensitive data electronically. The resulting UI featured the salesperson’s photo, title, cars sold, years at company, and contact options, each chosen to ease customer anxiety and ensure safe data sharing. ### [Intercom's product principles: Start with the problem to achieve better solutions - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/intercom-x27-s-product-principles-start-with-the-problem-to-achieve-be.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 8, 2026 - Type: Explainer Intercom’s primary product principle “Start with the problem” guides all its teams to focus on understanding real customer issues more deeply before designing any solutions. The company argues that many businesses fail because they quickly jump to solutions without thoroughly exploring the underlying problem, leading to solutions that often miss the mark, do not match real customer needs, and end up unused entirely. Common pitfalls include insufficient problem comprehension, failing to update problem understanding over time, and solving problems that are too niche, not urgent, or not aligned with customer needs. To counter this, Intercom dedicates about a third of a team’s effort to problem definition before any building begins, using problem statements and customer research. This whole-team approach builds shared understanding, ensures accurate solutions, and allows “porpoising” between problem and solution understanding while defining measurable success metrics upfront to validate impact. ### [Bridging technical depth and usability: The story behind Radar’s redesign](https://yomu.fyi/post/bridging-technical-depth-and-usability-the-story-behind-radar-s-redesi.md) - Company: [Cloudflare](https://yomu.fyi/company/cloudflare.md) - Author: Lai Yi Ohlsen - Published: Oct 8, 2026 - Type: Problem & solution Cloudflare Radar was redesigned to make its real-time Internet data accessible to journalists, human rights advocates, and everyday users while preserving depth for network operators and researchers. The previous landing page used a bento box layout that gave everything similar visual weight, felt intimidating to newcomers, and lacked brand consistency. The new design introduces an interactive map as the primary navigational element, leading with traffic and outages to provide concrete, timely reference points. Below the map, a tabbed exploration flow replaces the old chart widgets, offering summary statistics and clearer calls to action. The design language blends marketing approachability, content structure, and product maintainability by migrating to Cloudflare’s Kumo component system, aiming for a human-centered experience that does not sacrifice technical rigor. ### [Why design should start with words: Elizabeth McGuane, Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/why-design-should-start-with-words-elizabeth-mcguane-shopify.md) - Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md) - Published: Oct 5, 2026 - Type: Explainer Elizabeth McGuane, UX Director at Shopify, argues that the design process should begin with words—defining concepts and building shared language—before any visual work. She draws on 15 years of experience in web and product design to explain that misalignment often stems from teams arguing over names because they haven’t agreed on what something actually is. Her book ‘Design by Definition’ provides methods to use linguistic elements like metaphor and narrative to frame design problems clearly and improve collaboration across disciplines. McGuane emphasizes treating text as a spatial design element, prioritizing simplification and consistency over literary flourish. The interview also covers how evolving technologies like LLMs challenge traditional interface conventions, requiring designers to rethink their approach.