Design Director at Meta Superintelligence Lab working on Muse. Prev: Linear / Substack / Cocoon / Facebook / Dialpad / ISO50
San Francisco
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Here is a walkthrough of Muse! Excited to share more about the personal agent we’ve been working on.
muse.ai
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One of the most fundamental decisions we made early on with @Muse, was to contain every message in a bubble, like a chat app. Attaching the earliest comparison I could find – showing no container vs. the initial bubble treatment we used.
A founding principle was that Muse should feel like an entity not a tool. It’s an agent! Not a search box. And one of the clearest patterns to imply this is a message bubble.
Ironically, years before, I had argued for the exact opposite model.
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Beyond the visual, there are two reasons that this messaging-framing is so important: Muse exists in a canonical, single thread. And Muse is proactive.
Like messaging a person, there is no need for disparate threads*. Muse can handle growing context and multitask. This makes a single thread much simpler to manage and – just like a speaking with a person – a more natural exchange.
Proactivity is interesting, as it relates to bubbles. Given Muse can message you, the delineation of when it did so is uniquely important. It’s not turn-based! This makes the boundary between new messages more important than ever before. A bubble solves is a great solve for this.
*Before you say anything: side chats warrant their own post, and I’ll cover this at a later time.
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I ended up taking the bubble thing a little too far, and for some time, everything that Muse sent appeared in a bubble container. The entire app sat on a wash, and everything was elevated using a white bubble and a grey stroke. Grey and a black stroke in dark mode.
Can I say, I loved this. I miss it dearly. I am weirdly obsessed with the way a black stroke looks on an almost-black wash. And I think elevating with white-on-grey in light mode is just superior.
But, indeed, it was visually complex to do it literally everywhere in the app. When taken as a whole, this approach was visually noisy.
It will have to be another post, but this design direction died a fiery death in one fateful meeting, which changed the visual direction dramatically. For another time..
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When I look back at the earliest @Muse mocks, the very first thing that was designed was the “status” pill at the top of the screen. That one tiny piece of UI survived every subsequent revision, many months on.
It remains one of my favorite parts of the design. Its purpose is to simply and clearly answer the question: what is my agent doing right now? And do that across every surface of the app.
Representing status in this way is more of a messaging pattern and was kind of controversial early on. Most AI apps had coalesced around “chain of thought” as the way to represent ongoing work, which almost always appeared at the bottom of the thread itself. I had a petulant aversion to this and it didn’t work anyway, given the initial app was already three tabs (feed, chat, library). A persistent status display was necessary.
The initial version didn’t have the avatar and was only capable of ~6 deterministic states. Even in that basic form it was incredibly useful during testing – just showing connection status was critical in those early days.
Excited to share some more stories about the design of Muse. I haven’t tweeted in a few years as I’ve just been working away, but I think this will be a fun story.
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Alex Cornell retweeted
Introducing Linear Mobile.
The compact companion to the Linear system.
Ultraportable.
Fully native.
Built for afk workflows.
Now available for everyone:
linear.app/mobile
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Alex Cornell retweeted
🤿 @alexcornell has easily been one of the most requested guests over the past year
So I'm excited to share this week's episode :)
It's truly a masterclass in the finer details of communication 👇
join.dive.club/alex-cornell
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Was such a delight to talk to @ridd_design about some of my favorite topics 😃
🤿 @alexcornell has easily been one of the most requested guests over the past year
So I'm excited to share this week's episode :)
It's truly a masterclass in the finer details of communication 👇
join.dive.club/alex-cornell
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Reigniting my annual wish for Config: a reliable @figma Mirror app.
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Alex Cornell retweeted
Here's my new episode with @alexcornell with his top lessons from designing products at Meta, Substack, and Linear.
We talked about:
- How anyone can learn design
- The #1 design mistake to avoid
- How interfaces will change with AI
📌 Watch now: piped.video/srqxOSr382M
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Today I am excited to join many (many!) old friends back at Meta, this time working on Generative AI. Getting the band back together was too tempting..
..and alas, I had a wonderful time working at Linear; I'm excited for everyone to try the app soon! It's in very capable hands.
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Alex Cornell retweeted
This is so creative, thought it was some crazy shader at first. Brb pouring canola oil on all my animations
Here is a behind-the-scenes process of the loop I made for the @linear launch today.
I wish it were more complicated than pouring canola oil on my daughters iPad, but that was essentially it.
The attached video shows the final footage alongside the original, unaffected capture.
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Alex Cornell retweeted
In a world dominated by digital tools, it's easy to forget that sometimes you just need to pour some oil on your daughter's iPad.
Here is a behind-the-scenes process of the loop I made for the @linear launch today.
I wish it were more complicated than pouring canola oil on my daughters iPad, but that was essentially it.
The attached video shows the final footage alongside the original, unaffected capture.
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Here is a behind-the-scenes process of the loop I made for the @linear launch today.
I wish it were more complicated than pouring canola oil on my daughters iPad, but that was essentially it.
The attached video shows the final footage alongside the original, unaffected capture.
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This is the final version. One idea I just had while writing this, would have been to use the fluid as a mask and reveal the logo sort of like a linear wipe. I'll try that next time!
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Years ago, I had the honor of shooting the behind-the-scenes for @gmunk's Eric Prydz music video. The techinique that always stuck with me was filming a monitor through some kind of refraction. You can see that done at an elite level here: piped.video/Y2LV25YqLN0?si=Todv…
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