Why We Redesigned Inbox

Help Scout has changed a lot in the 13 years since we launched. We’ve added entirely new products, built new features and functionality, and even changed our branding a few times . Amongst all this change, the conversation view has remained largely the same as it was on day one.

As creators, we favor gradual improvements over drastic overhauls, particularly with essential functions. We understand that many customers rely on our tools daily, and we recognize the impact disruptive changes can have on their workflows.

That’s why we’ve spent so much time and intentional effort on launching Inbox 2  —  our second iteration of Help Scout’s conversation view in over a decade and a radical shift from what customers are used to. So, given that nobody was asking for a whole new UI,  the question is… why did we do it?

Quite simply: It was time.

As the demands of support professionals have evolved alongside our goal of building helpful tools, we found ourselves piling features onto an increasingly cluttered interface. Simplicity is central to everything we create and a big reason customers choose Help Scout, and continually adding to the UI was beginning to hurt usability. We needed to integrate AI tools, improve workflows, and implement several new enhancements, but the existing interface simply couldn’t accommodate them. It was clear we had outgrown our legacy experience.

Another similar and compelling motivation was the underlying technology  — we were accruing “tech debt” that was growing difficult to repay. The outdated and complex code supporting the legacy inbox severely restricted our ability to rapidly build and ship new features, and even small fixes were difficult and costly. Much like the UI, adding new code caused more problems than it solved.

From iteration to innovation

You might argue that a cluttered UI and mounting tech debt was more of an “us” problem than a “you” problem. After all, one of our key success metrics is creating tools that enhance your experience, which is why we initially resisted making major changes. Instead, we tried to manage these challenges with incremental adjustments. A couple more icons here and a few more menus there couldn’t hurt, right?

Several years back  —  alongside this growing realization that change was on the horizon — we began conducting research for a feature now known as Views. We spoke to teams of all sizes across a broad range of business types and locations, including our own Customer Support team, to better understand how our features were being used. We also used these research sessions to revisit the day-to-day problems Help Scout solves with fresh eyes and understand how customers see the broader role of support within their businesses, which is especially important considering the proliferation of AI.

Our research made it evident that change was unavoidable — the needs and expectations of modern support teams had evolved significantly since Help Scout’s debut in 2011. What once served as a straightforward tool to help businesses engage with their customers via email now needed to expand to support a broader range of communication channels, business sizes, industries, and shifting market demands.

Support teams have changed, so Help Scout needed to evolve, too.

Taking on a new direction

Imagining the future requires an acknowledgment of the past. In this sense, we came to appreciate that the old Mailbox did one thing really well : It optimized for quick replies. In fact, for a large portion of customers who use smaller screens, the replying tools took up the entirety of the screen. While this worked well for those prioritizing speed, it came at the expense of understanding the full conversation. Tracking the evolution of customer interactions, grasping the needs and motivations of those involved, and charting a clear path to resolution only became more challenging as time went on. 

A desire to balance the old speed of response with a new contextual understanding of the conversation helped establish our first guiding value of design: Context is key. 

In a design sense, our goal for the new Mailbox was to enable customers to quickly scan a conversation and understand its flow at a glance. The challenge, however, lay in the complexity of modern conversations that span across email, chat, phone, and social channels. These interactions must highlight key actions like assignments, status updates, and workflow changes while involving various participants — customers, team members, and even AI. It also includes balancing real-time, asynchronous, and future interactions such as scheduled messages. We’ve come a long way from the simplicity of one-to-one email exchanges.

One of my favorite ways we addressed that need for contextual understanding in Inbox 2 is the layout of the threads themselves. Their colors, badges, and avatar locations have been thoughtfully designed so that without reading a word, users can easily understand the flow of a conversation over time, including who was involved and where information came from.

Through trial and error and by stress-testing our designs with thousands of hours of real-world use (shout-out to our own Support team!), we found these subtle decisions resulted in a noticeably reduced cognitive load after prolonged use. Instead of having to read an entire conversation to decide what to do next… now you just know.

The second guiding value that emerged from talking with customers and testing early concepts was to cater to the individual. When we introduced new designs with our group of testers, it seemed that there were equal amounts of positive and negative feedback for every decision we made. Some people loved a collapsed sidebar, others absolutely hated it. The full-screen composer made as many friends as it did enemies. Some people always need custom fields while others never do. The conversation ID was a relic of the past to some and non-negotiable to others. The list went on.

Understanding the root of these polarizing sentiments required a return to our research . Instead of there being one way to use Help Scout, we learned that the role of an individual and the task at hand often dictate which features and what information is necessary in any given interaction.

For people tasked with writing responses, a full-screen editor, minimized sidebars, and quick access to saved replies are important. For those triaging and assigning conversations, quick access to AI summaries, custom fields, and meta information (such as tags) are critical. Similarly, when dealing with escalations, the information necessary to make sure you’re treading carefully — timestamps, previous conversations, and a full audit of activity — is going to require a different set of tools than a normal, everyday conversation.

Our response was to put the controls in your hands . Allowing every Help Scout user to customize their workspace to reflect the nature of their role is a design foundation we intend to continue building on moving forward. Today you’ll see this in your ability to change the layout, expose more details, or narrow your focus right down to a single task like replying.

Simply powerful

The third and final guiding value for the design of Inbox 2 — and a clear requirement originating from our research — was simple but powerful. We wanted Inbox to be simple enough for new customers to master while being powerful enough to meet the needs of seasoned professionals. As any designer will tell you, it is no easy task to create an intuitive interface while maintaining complex features.

It was through watching how customers engaged with the legacy inbox — especially those dealing with high volumes of messages — that we came to understand how seemingly-insignificant actions could have large and negative impacts on performance (and happiness) over the course of a day or week. Small things, like shifting the mouse to assign a conversation or moving your head from left to right to read a single line of text, represented performance improvements we knew we needed to make. 

That didn’t feel like power or mastery.

This desire to bring power to your fingertips is evident in a few areas, most notably in our mouse-free navigation. New users can continue to use the mouse, while advanced users can trigger powerful actions from the new ⌘K menu, quickly format via markdown in the editor, type / to access a suite of tools while replying, or control any part of the UI with the keyboard alone. 

We also catered to a broader audience through a more accessible product. Inbox 2 uses higher contrast colors, words instead of icons, limited line lengths, and groupings of common actions. These improvements are all intended to reduce the burden on your eyes over time, and they have already been celebrated by our neurodiverse users, of which I am one.

One of the best attributes of Inbox 2 — and a much harder thing to quantify — is the knowledge that you are able to provide the most helpful and accurate customer support simply by using it. We believe heightened productivity comes from using a simple interface that puts conversations as the focus while providing the option to easily layer on complexity and functionality as and when you need it.

Similarly, feelings of reduced anxiety come from working in an inbox that is optimized for writing your best responses (hello, new full-screen editor), collaborating easily and securely with your team without fear of exposing private conversations to customers, and engaging in advanced organization tactics (did I mention Views?) without the complexity you’d expect when creating smart automation

A new beginning

Reflecting on the problems of a cluttered UI, technical debt, and our inability to meet the expectations of the modern customer, Inbox 2 represents a clean slate. But it’s more than that: We’ve achieved simplicity without compromise and unlocked new flexibility and power for our users. 

It’s taken years of research and thousands of hours of evolution, collaboration, and iteration using the feedback of 10,000+ early adopters. What we launched this month lays a new foundation, but it represents only the beginning of our journey. The real magic will happen as you put it to work in your day-to-day processes and as we begin to integrate new features that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible — starting with AI tools and Views. 

We know that change is never easy, especially when it’s unexpected and when it affects the tools you rely on to do your job. We don’t take that impact lightly, and we are here to support our users in every way possible — perhaps in this case, by providing the context behind why we felt change was necessary and the assurance that everything you see is deliberate and built with care.

It may take some time to fully settle into the new interface, and at first it will feel slow and disorienting. But give Inbox 2 a chance, and we promise you that in no time you'll find that it's faster, gives you more space to work, and enables you to delight more customers in less time — a win for everyone involved.