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Building a cross-platform product

Our product teams pride themselves on working in small, autonomous units. Each team has their own roadmap, their own weekly goals, and...

Announcing the new Intercom Messenger

Our new messenger marks the culmination of a year’s worth of work. We’re announcing our new messenger to help businesses more personally...

5 messages for every onboarding campaign

Most of the writing on onboarding focuses exclusively on what’s happening on the interface. Advice on modals, tooltips, and gestures is...

Principles of bot design

Despite plenty of excitement it’s still unclear how conversational UIs can be made to work in a practical sense. But opinionated design...

Bots versus humans

Everyone is talking about the rise of chatbots; but are forgetting that humans are pretty good too. In recent months we’ve seen Facebook,...

Word of mouth

Word of mouth is the first traffic source. You can’t put a price on its value, and it sure as hell isn’t free. You’ll only get word of...

The end of app stores as we know them

Uber isn’t just killing the taxi industry. Its relentless approach to distribution and scale is also putting a nail in the coffin of app...

Product principles: read receipts

When we released our real-time messenger, we tried to push aside the traditional live-chat model, and instead took our cues from modern...

It’s time for notifications to get smart

My phone buzzed. I was somewhere in Iceland. More than ten miles from my car and any other human being. Holding a phone with a dying...

Design is a conversation

It’s often said design is a dialogue between designer and user. We talk to users about what they want and need. We discuss projects with...

Why we built our message editor twice

Building a sound, intuitive message editor for use everywhere in Intercom proved to be a much more challenging, time-consuming, and...

Effective messages have real goals

Knowing precisely what you want to achieve from a message before you send it is key. Not only to crafting the right kind of message but...

Seven properties of effective messages

The messages you send to customers need to work hard and work fast if they’re to engage with any real purpose. Attention is fleeting,...

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