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Product Design
35 posts about Product Design. Every summary links to the original.
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Using Intercom to design Intercom - The Intercom Blog
A designer at Intercom explains how the team uses their own product to gather data-driven insights for design decisions, replacing intuition with evidence from real customer interactions. Support team members tag feature requests and confusing conversations, which the research team organizes by topic for easy access. In one example, the designer analyzed 120 conversations about multi-person messaging and found only 33% actually wanted that feature, while others needed handoff or transfer capabilities. In another, an automated message targeting users who sent one-to-one messages via the fully featured editor revealed within hours that the ability to duplicate messages was the missing feature. This approach ensures design solutions are based on real customer needs rather than surface-level requests.
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.
How users understand new products - The Intercom Blog
Users form different mental models of the same product based on their experiences and assumptions, as illustrated by the “draw toast” exercise where people depict the process in diverse ways. When a product’s system model—how it actually works—aligns with a user’s mental model, the interface feels intuitive; a mismatch causes confusion. To discover these mental models, product teams should talk to users, ask them to draw how they believe the product works, and listen to the nouns and verbs they use. Designers can bridge gaps by employing standard interface patterns (e.g., buttons that behave like buttons), using customers’ own language, and leveraging metaphors like Apple Wallet’s ticket-like appearance or Nest’s dial-based thermostat interface. When a product cannot mirror existing mental models, teams can educate users through tutorials and walkthroughs, similar to video game onboarding, helping customers learn new concepts and quickly grasp the product’s value.
How A/B Testing Can Help Your Team Prioritize, Not Just Validate
A/B testing can help teams prioritize projects by forcing them to estimate effect sizes and required sample sizes before committing resources. The most common mistake is calling tests too early based on statistical significance without sufficient statistical power, leading to unreliable results. To run a test correctly, teams should estimate the expected KPI improvement, use a sample size calculator to determine test duration, and decide if the wait is worthwhile. For example, a complete signup flow redesign expected to boost conversion from 10% to 15% requires 24 times less data than a color change expected to lift it to 11%, and a non-significant result can still be useful. Startups with limited traffic should focus on large, high-potential changes to avoid working towards a local maximum, while larger companies with high traffic can profitably test small optimizations.
Content strategy: How words build a product - The Intercom Blog
Words in a product evolve like the Ship of Theseus, with each change affecting identity; the term “page” long constrained web design, showing how working titles gain unintended baggage. Intercom’s content strategy transforms this organic dialect into an intentional one, addressing team silos and UI inconsistencies. They categorized every visible word—objects, views, people, actions—into a taxonomy and glossary that gave consistency and control over how each part is described and how parts relate. They interviewed all teams to map natural vocabularies, discovering job-related differences and treating them as assets. Finally, they derived three UI writing principles: speak naturally, speak directly to the user but never for the user, and guide users through complex ideas, recommending that content strategy start after discovering the organic voice already present.
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.
Designing Features Using Job Stories - Inside Intercom
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.
The dribbblisation of design - The Intercom Blog
Paul Adams argues that the Dribbble community rewards superficial aesthetics, moving product design backward. He observes that job applicants often submit pixel-perfect PNGs lacking context, business constraints, or problem definition, focusing on visual polish rather than solving real problems. Strong candidates instead present sketches, whiteboard diagrams, and prototypes that show interactions with real data, documenting pros, cons, and tradeoffs made during the process. True product design begins with company mission and a clear product architecture defining system components and their relationships, such as Facebook’s directory of people, friends, and interests with its relationship map, then progresses through outcome, system, interaction, and visual layers. The Jobs framework, structured as ‘When ____, I want ____, so I can ____,’ forces designers to specify triggering events and desired outcomes, ensuring designs are mapped to the company mission and product architecture.
Product strategy best practices [with examples]
Product strategy requires being great at saying no, not maybe or later, to maintain a cohesive product with well-defined parameters. When a product gains traction, good ideas for features come from customers, colleagues, and oneself, each with reasons to say yes. The post presents 12 common arguments used to sneak features in, such as selective data analysis, feature blackmail, and appeals to anecdote or raw numbers. It argues that even good ideas should be rejected if they do not fit within the product’s purview, as every addition adds hidden complexity and weakens product definition. Saying no to good ideas is the hard part of product decisions, distinguishing a repository of features from a true product.
Product Judgment: How to repeatedly create product success
Product judgment is the ability to use your own intuition to repeatedly and accurately predict what customers need, want, and value, and to design and ship the right solution for them. It is not innate but learned through years of deliberate, wide-ranging direct experiences with real customers using your product, covering both the product and the market sides and all customer types. Indirect sources like summarized feature requests, survey data, or recorded interviews cannot create it, only supplement judgment already built through direct contact. You must also deeply know your product by using it yourself to fully interpret customer feedback and ask perceptive questions, and you must continually check your predictions against outcomes to refine your judgment. Building strong judgment requires never-ending customer contact as technology and competitors evolve, is domain specific, and typically demands at least 100 to over 1,000 direct interactions.
Systems Thinking: How to Apply in Product Design [+Tips]
Systems thinking is a top-down design approach that considers the overarching system before diving into specific interface interactions, preventing premature detail fixation. It is based on Donella H. Meadows’ definition that a system is an interconnected set of elements coherently organized to achieve something, prompting questions about elements, interconnections, and purpose. For Intercom’s Articles product, the team identified the article as the core element and mapped how articles are created, delivered, and interact with other systems, resulting in a complex system diagram. This systems view revealed opportunities like an intelligent suggestion engine that recommends articles during conversations and allowed the team to prioritize the most important parts to build first. The approach also encouraged reusing the Messenger Reactions component for article feedback, sharing design and implementation details like hover effects and clicked states across contexts.
Intercom on Product: How to design standout products in an AI world - The Intercom Blog
Intercom’s VP of Design Emmet Connolly and Staff Product Designer Molly Mahar discuss how product designers must adapt their methods for AI, drawing from their experiences building Intercom’s products. They explain that designing for AI means moving from deterministic to probabilistic systems, where unpredictability is the norm and designers must design flexibly around surprises. Data quality is foundational for reliable AI, so designers should prioritize it; realistic prototyping using actual data helps capture essential user feedback and evaluate output effectiveness. Extensive testing is necessary to anticipate possible system failures; if live versions catch designers off guard, testing must be more robust. Building user trust requires consistent positive experiences and transparency about how the system works and its data, enabling designers to create AI experiences that make users feel comfortable and confident.
Intercom on Product: Product strategy in the age of AI - The Intercom Blog
In this episode of Intercom on Product, co-founder Des Traynor and CPO Paul Adams discuss how AI, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT, will transform the software industry and urge product leaders to reconsider their strategies for disruption. They argue that to truly disrupt established categories, startups must offer a unique attack angle that incumbents cannot easily replicate, rather than merely adding AI features without strategic differentiation. For product managers, they recommend evaluating AI opportunities by whether they expand the user base, enhance users’ abilities, or eliminate entire tasks, citing customer support as a domain rich with potential. They note that incumbents may survive disruption by integrating AI through APIs, making the ratio of new work required versus existing advantage critical. Traynor advises rereading ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ to understand true disruption and warns that many AI startups risk becoming unpaid R&D for larger companies that can copy their features.
Why design should start with words: Elizabeth McGuane, Shopify
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.
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