Emmet Connolly is the Director of Product Design at Intercom, an Irish-founded business based in Dublin and San Francisco. Intercom’s product enables businesses to “communicate with customers, personally, at scale”. Connolly joined Intercom from Google in 2014. In January of that year, the business had secured $23m funding, and it has secured bigger funding rounds each subsequent year. This extended period of expansion has facilitated the growth of a formidable design team (and a move to the old Anglo Irish Bank offices on St. Stephen’s Green).
“How I got there is actually a bit of a rigmarole… I designed Google Flight Search while working in the Google Zurich office. I also worked on the Google search results page, which is quite painstaking just because even the tiniest changes you make can have such a huge impact, when so many people use it.” That slow and painstaking work led Connolly to start a side project, the outcome of which was Android Wear. “A small group of us built better and better prototypes and gradually got something compelling hacked together. Our earliest prototypes which were nothing more than phones taped to our arms. I moved to San Francisco to make the project a reality and we finally launched it as Android Wear, Google’s smart watch platform.”
“I’ll always remember the warm and fuzzies I got standing in the prototype factory as the first real devices came off the production line. But when I started thinking about what I might do next Intercom was top of a very short list. I knew some of the founders and other early employees and knew I could learn a lot working with them.”
The move to Intercom also meant a return to Dublin for Connolly. “I feel positive about the local design scene here, which honestly I didn’t ten years ago when I felt like I had to leave Ireland to gain the kind of experience I was after… I’ve been lucky to work with what I think are some truly world-class design teams in the past. But I’m convinced that there’s absolutely zero reason we can’t do that here in Dublin; build an absolutely world-class design team. So that’s exactly what I’m doing!”
“I’ve slowly been able to re-engage with a lot of the design folks here through my work. There’s something about a nice small city that makes it very easy to get to know people quickly. And I think it’s coincided with a bit of a resurgence in digital product design here – it really feels like there’s more happening now than ever before, which is exciting.”
“One thing we like to do at Intercom is put on events. We just finished a six-leg tour of talks that we gave across Europe which culminated in a return to our home town and a big event in the Olympia – very rock and roll! So that’s a great way to get out and meet people, but also hopefully to foster a bit of a local community of design folks. We also do things like host Creative Mornings events and guest speakers in our office in St. Stephen’s Green.”
The nature of Connolly’s work is at once connected and distant from the heritage of product design, which was historically associated with craft and making. This tool and toil approach has lent itself to an expansion of practice into the development and creation of digital products. “Roles and job titles keep evolving as the technology progresses,” says Connolly. “I don’t think there are many industries where the work itself keeps being reinvented and redesigned.”
“I think the biggest change is towards thinking about the product as a whole. Very few designers working in technology today limit their work to aesthetics. Designers today work with lots of interconnected technologies, so being able to think about designing systems that work and not just interfaces is a big deal.”
“The work is never done. Iteration is what allows technology to keep on this inexorable crawl of getting better every year, which we almost take for granted. I think of digital design as a broad collaborative effort, because people steal from each other all the time. Which is great, because they add on some new idea. But if you want to invent some new thing – and we talk about this a lot on the team – a great way is to lean into that iterative nature of the material and start with some tiny representative version of the idea, and gradually build out in tiny steps from there. Maybe it’s less of the ‘flash of genius’ inspiration, and more of the craftsperson patiently working away.”
“Digital products are a lot more malleable,” he adds. “It’s like a forgiving material, you can make a lot of mistakes and just tweak it to fix. So the advantage there is that with digital things you have many attempts to get it wrong.”
Alongside Connolly’s design work, he is also a regular contributor to the Intercom blog and publishes on his own site. “Writing on our blog is basically part of my job. Everyone in the company is encouraged to write for it, and I think that challenge brings really good work in lots of people who otherwise wouldn’t have. I’m quite proud of the Intercom blog.”
“Personally I find it useful… It’s a forcing function for turning some vague fuzzy sense of an idea into concrete thinking. So it’s good for just pushing your ideas forward. Every time you write about something you learn a bit more and your understanding gets clearer.”
Having come from San Francisco – which he refers to variously as “epicentre” and “bubble”, Connolly also draws a distinction between Dublin as a centre for business and as a centre for design: “Irish people are lucky, in that they’ve got options at home and mobility to go elsewhere. We’ve got international opportunities in education and in work. In my world, there’s obviously some advantage to having a Silicon Valley connection if you’re looking to really build a business, but when it comes to doing the work of designing and building product… that can be done anywhere and there’s no reason we can’t do it here.”
David Wall is a graphic designer and partner at WorkGroup and a founder of the 100 Archive.
For more on Emmet’s work and Intercom, check out: emmetconnolly.com and intercom.io
Words: David Wall
