Design & storytelling at Muse

I joined Muse as a designer & storyteller in 2022 and stayed with the team until it downscaled in 2023. My role involved a blend of web design, content creation, and communications. The closest equivalent in more commonly known job titles might be “digital designer.” This page contains a summary of things I’ve done and some highlights.

Muse is a freeform canvas for focused thinking available for iPad and Mac. It’s the tool I reach for when I’m in the messy middle of my creative process—I’ve accumulated texts, PDFs, images, videos, and a collection of ideas, and now I need to figure out how they all connect.

The Muse team was intentionally small, with just seven members. Small teams move faster and face fewer challenges in staying aligned. Everyone wears multiple hats, which is exactly why I’ve been drawn to teams of this size—I enjoy the variety in my role and the chance to pick up new skills along the way.

My job was to design for the web but also to use design as a tool to tell stories about the product. On a regular basis, I would:

• Produce short demo clips. Whenever the team shipped exciting new features, my job was to highlight them in short clips or screenshots. Example:

• Contribute to memos. Mostly with ideas, visual content, and copyedits. We had a lead wordsmith and memo writing was very much a shared experience within the team. Everyone’s input was equally important.

I also worked on one-off projects like:

• Started a Discord community.
• Created a survey to better understand the needs of teams.
• Created instructional videos for Youtube (this didn’t last long unfortunately).

During my time at Muse, I brushed up on dusty video editing skills, made the most git commits of my career, and I now know a whole lot about online community platforms. I also never thought I’d see my face on YouTube, but I’m glad I jumped this hurdle as well.

Project highlights

Group ideation user research

The team decided to experiment with a teams-based version of Muse. Multiplayer functionality had always been part of our long-term roadmap, and this felt like the right moment to explore that direction. However, we needed validation that there was enough demand for collaborative features. To find answers and better understand the needs of teams using an ideation tool, we embedded a survey into the alpha sign-up process.

The responses we received validated the teams path and helped us identify team leads who matched our customer archetype. We followed up with one-on-one interviews to gain deeper insights into their teams’ ideation processes. These insights guided product development process, inspired our group ideation memo, and later shaped the new messaging for the 3.0 launch.

Muse 3.0

Towards the end of 2023, the company entered a new phase, both as a business and a product. I contributed to this transition by crafting the messaging, redesigning the website, refreshing the icon, and simplifying the user handbook. The project took just over two months, and I worked in collaboration with our lead storyteller and product designer.

This was a relaunch of Muse, shifting back to a product for individual use after a few months of experimenting as a teams-centric product. A lot of the work involved looking through Muse’s history, pulling together what worked, and blending it with the newer materials from the teams phase.