Alex Cornell's videos and podcasts
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A distinctive feature of Muse is the tab bar. It was one of the first things in the initial prototype, and it felt like a foreign addition for an AI app. So foreign that I recall leaving on PTO early on and leaving one instruction: "do not remove the tab bar," knowing how tantalizing it would be to simplify the app by removing it.
September 2026
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.
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.
Meta AI started without an app; it could only be accessed in Messenger so it was portrayed like any other entity in that system, with message bubbles. I made a 10min internal video arguing to remove the bubble. It became a crusade (in 2024) to pop the bubbles and free our responses from the visual confines of grey wash!
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.
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.
August 2026
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Alex Cornell - How to present your designs and get buy-in for your ideas (Dive Club Ep. 58)
