Maria 👋🏽

Intercom Blog Redesign

Team

Design: Maria Gonzalez
Director of Design: Stewart Scott Curran

The challenge

Intercom wanted to introduce a new design for their blog that would showcase their podcast, books, their world tour: Inside Intercom and weekly posts from employees.

Goals

The goals for the blog redesign included: easy discoverability of articles within different verticals, increase newsletter sign ups, ability to promote Intercom product features, books, and podcasts and easy consumption of material being published.

Issues with the old design:

Lack of visual hierarchy: The structure of the page lacked visual hierarchy —from the size of the navigation banner to the hero image, buttons, blurbs and icons. The lack of hierarchy caused users to consume less articles —many would not scroll past the headline of the third article.

Navigation: Upon scroll, the user no longer had access to the navigation, without going all the way back up to the top. Also, when reading an article, there was no easy way to navigate to other verticals.

Load time: The lack of pagination and lazy loading caused articles to load very slowly, therefore causing users to drop off.

What did I do:

I designed the flow and ui of the new Intercom blog. I explored various homepage layouts and article pages that would make it easier for the user to discover content from different verticals. The top navigation remains sticky throughout the experience allowing the user to quickly jump from one category to the next. The use of never ending scrolling also allowed the user to continue reading another article when reaching the end of one.

Overall, there was a sharp focus on how readers navigate a blog and what’s important to them. You’ll see things like estimated reading, viewing and listening times and progress bars as you read through articles. Lastly, we wanted the blog to look and feel like a magazine. The content being published is more akin to a high-quality editorial publication, rather than another run of the mill corporate blog.

Explorations:

I paid close attention to hierarchy, typography and illustration in order to create a connected and organized experience. To increase visual impact and give the homepage a sharper point of view, I focused on one lead article, followed by secondary and tertiary articles. To build out this hierarchy, it was essential to have a solid grid in place to form the backbone of the design and give pages their structure.

Final design:

The redesign creates hierarchy within articles, allows users to consume more articles at once, and allocates space for Intercom product branding. The sticky nav allows users to quickly navigate from one vertical to the next. Having "newsletter signup CTA" in the sticky nav bar also caused increase sign ups. Lastly, the use of pagination allowed articles to load at a much faster pace.
View the design from when it launched here