December 2014 Summaries

The author, who recently left Google to join Intercom as its Product Design team head, is drawn to Intercom because of its smaller company culture and the opportunities it presents for innovation and growth. The author believes that traditional contact forms and email ticket systems are inadequate for supporting businesses that operate primarily online and mobile devices, where users expect seamless and effortless communication with companies. Instead, they envision a platform that enables businesses to communicate with customers in a more personal and responsible manner, using messaging as the central interaction model. This platform has the potential to solve real problems and extend beyond the boundaries of a single product, making Intercom an exciting opportunity for innovation and growth.

At Intercom, they're working towards making web and mobile business more personal by focusing on performance and availability. They believe that clear communication is crucial during service outages, which can be stressful for both customers and engineering teams. To achieve this, Intercom has set up a status page using StatusPage.io, providing real-time information on application performance metrics from New Relic and uptime monitoring from Pingdom. The goal is to improve availability to better than 99.9% each month, with feedback mechanisms in place for customers and stakeholders.

Our new blog design is live, marking another step in our investment in content creation. We've increased publishing frequency without compromising quality, and the redesign addresses issues with outdated content calendars, focusing too much on production, and poor browsing experience. The new design features improved categories, tags, author pages, search functionality, and a mobile-friendly layout, allowing users to easily find related content and engage with our blog in a more intuitive way. We're proud of this update and look forward to the next 200 articles on our blog.