Superlist
Designing the integrations layer: connecting a modern productivity tool to the apps people already work in.
Company:
Superlist
Industry:
Role:
Senior Product Designer
Focus:
Year:
2022-23
Overview
Superlist users were spending most of their day in Slack. When something actionable came up, they had to switch context to create a task — breaking their flow. The goal was simple: let users capture tasks from inside Slack, without it feeling disruptive.
The design challenge
This wasn't just a Superlist design problem. It required designing across two products simultaneously — respecting Slack's native UI patterns while keeping the experience coherent on the Superlist side.
That meant mapping every connection state a user might be in: connected, unconnected, connected but without access. Each state needed a response that felt native to Slack — contextual, quiet, and non-intrusive.
Designing for states
One pattern we leaned on was Slack's private, temporary messages visible only to the user. This let us handle edge cases like unconnected accounts or restricted task access without disrupting the shared channel.
For example, copying a Superlist link into Slack triggered different experiences depending on whether your was account connected/disconnected. It was a small detail with a meaningful impact on first-time users.
Creating a task from Slack
The core interaction needed to feel lightweight. Users could create a Superlist task directly from a Slack message, add metadata, and have it land correctly in Superlist — without ever leaving Slack.
Delight & Micro-interactions
Alongside integrations, I owned a range of smaller features focused on delight — message reactions, transcriptions, embedded links and GIFs. These were less complex to design but equally important to the product's character.
Reflection
Superlist taught me to design with constraints I couldn't fully control. Working across two products meant understanding Slack's system well enough to design within it, not just around it. It also pushed me to think in states and scenarios more rigorously than I had before — a habit that's stayed with me.
