Inbox

I’m pretty sure I confidently declared “email is dead” when I worked at Skype 16 years ago! How wrong I was. Email remains the lifeblood of companies that understand the deep value of delightful, human, and context-rich customer support — and that’s where Help Scout comes in.

But it’s not just email anymore. AI supplements context. Real-time chat and social channels complement long-form threads. Even how we communicate has evolved — with emoji, team collaboration, and integrations expanding our ability to delight. One thing’s clear… how we email today is very different from all those years ago.

This was the challenge I faced at Help Scout: preparing our core experience for the future. The shared inbox, once industry-leading, was now a 12-year-old product straining under technical limitations and growing expectations. It was time to reimagine it from the ground up — a project that took me a year of design, testing and constant iteration.

Before & after. Visually similar, fundamentally different.

Good bones 🦴Direct link

Every decision was grounded in three core principles: to enable world-class support, to offer deep personalization for every user, and to surface the rich context needed to deliver truly delightful experiences.

One of the biggest challenges — and ultimately, one of the greatest rewards — was designing an interface flexible enough to support deep customization in both layout and behavior. From wide-screen views and collapsing sidebars to formatting toolbars and quick menus, Inbox adapts to the unique role and workflow of each individual.

Another fun (and surprisingly complex) challenge was designing for a wide range of content types while maintaining clarity and legibility within a dense interface. One solution was leveraging AI to detect and truncate non-original content — helping keep every email focused, scannable, and easy to read.

Make writing fun!Direct link

Designing an editor is no joke. There’s how it resizes with content, how formatting tools behave, how add-ons are integrated — and that’s before you even get to the different modes: notes, drafts, forwards, edits. It’s a surprisingly complex ecosystem.

But because writing is at the heart of great support, it was absolutely worth the effort. After 50+ iterations, deep research, and hundreds of prototypes, we landed on a design that’s simple, focused, and puts content first. It’s an experience built for accessibility, optimized for legibility, and ready to scale with the growing demands of AI-powered support.

Attention to detail ✨Direct link

Spending your day replying to emails can be a drag, so I looked for every opportunity to add moments of fun, personality, and humanity. Bright colors, rounded corners, and a playful tone of voice helped turn the inbox into a space where magic happens.

Read: Behind the Scenes

I wrote about how we reimagined Inbox — why it needed a fresh start, and how we navigated thousands of pieces of feedback to get it right.

Psst… wanna see something fun? I’ve always believed AI should help people create magic — not replace them. So I designed a t-shirt that celebrates the squishiness and uniqueness of human-first support:

🖕🏼 It's me.

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