Solving Fifty Shades of Blue
There was a stage a few years ago when our Intercom product featured roughly 50 shades of blue. Some of them were intentionally...
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What we learned building our bot
When a new technology emerges, there’s an initial trigger. The masses react and become disillusioned, and then the trend slowly builds...
The hidden cost of design complexity
“Simple Design” when building products is probably the most common leitmotif in tech companies. Yet we often only see one side of the...
How to make cross-functional design teams work
Traditionally design teams have been centralized, such that all designers worked on the same team and would take on projects together....
Invisible design: why less is more
The hardest-working designers – and some of their best design decisions – are the ones you don’t even notice. Have you ever been charged...
The cult of conversational design: why forms aren’t dead yet
2016 was the year of conversational design. Everywhere we looked, conversational UIs were breaking out of messaging apps and into the...
When collaboration becomes a chore
As companies grow, the modes of collaboration shift from natural conversation to more organised meetings, but how do you keep a healthy...
Why you should ‘read’ a product like a book
Here’s how the little-known skill of “active reading” can teach you how great products get built – and ultimately how to be a better...
The minimum viable product design portfolio
Over the past few months, I’ve reviewed dozens of product design portfolios, so many that I’ve been thinking deeply about what a good...
Applying systems thinking in product design
If your product design process looks anything like ours, each project will start with a clear set of problems to solve. But what happens...
Great PMs don’t spend their time on solutions
Over the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about building product at Intercom. Some things have worked really well, some less so. To...
A design lesson 3.5 billion years in the making
One of the great things about designing digital products is that our products are never finished. We can continuously change them over...
Design workshops that work: how to get better at brainstorming
As a product designer creating digital experiences, it’s equally important to obsess over the physical ones too. Design and collaboration...
How design thinking can inform data problems
There is no questioning the usefulness of data in design. Data helps us understand our customers’ behavior, something that’s fundamental...
Using Intercom to design Intercom
I used to design products based on my experience, intuition and discussions with my project manager, engineers and other designers. We...
Why voice bots will rule the chatbot landscape
When consumer internet arrived in the 1990s, it ushered in a new age of communication. Free internet chat applications like ICQ, MSN and...
Bot names – what should you name yours?
Every year in design circles, there’s a buzzword. This year, the buzzword is without question bots. And as with anything we build, we...
Designing for the other side of the screen
Solve real problems. It’s become a universally agreed upon principle when designing products. Less agreed upon is just how truly...
Running productive design critiques
There is no “right answer” in design. To stay on the right track you need to really understand the problem you’re trying to fix and...
The golden mean of design and engineering
There was a time when I viewed designers with the same scepticism as I viewed homeopathy. When I pictured designers I thought of Mad Men,...
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