How Superhuman uses Framer to ship faster with less developer time.

Superhuman has traditionally been a very engineer-heavy team, with Engineering, Product, and Design teams owning various aspects of the website. Late last year, Superhuman transformed the way they work – from a traditional EPD organisation to creating smaller, focused cross-functional pods.

Superhuman’s old website was a custom-built site, creating what was essentially a “homemade web pack”. It lacked speed and didn’t align with the design and marketing teams’ workflows. This and their organisational change meant they needed to explore different tools to hand their marketing team control of the website.

Time For a New Tool

Last year, Superhuman did what most engineering-led companies need to do at some point – hire a stellar marketing team. The new marketing team, led by Seiyonne Suriyakumar, had big plans. They wanted to quickly design and launch landing pages for case studies, product highlight pages, and verticals. However, their site setup's lack of flexibility and speed had restricted the amount of quality work they could execute.

Evaluating Framer vs Webflow

The Superhuman team knew they wanted to work with a no-code tool to speed up their workflow and hand control back to the teams needing it. Naturally, they came across both Framer and Webflow and thoroughly evaluated both products to identify which would best suit their needs.

While Webflow is a great tool, the team at Superhuman knew that they wanted something that didn’t come with a significant learning curve. With Framer, there’s no need to know frontend code. If your designers and marketers have used Figma before, they can quickly adapt to Framer, shipping new site updates and landing pages faster than ever.

The engineers at Superhuman were also really keen to try Framer out. Compared to other tools that they’d used in the past, Framer is a lot more fun. Adding and managing custom code into a Framer project is much easier than other website builders.

Leadership at Superhuman knew that Webflow has been in the no-code space for longer and is arguably more established. The primary motivator for Superhuman’s decision to proceed with Framer came from them checking out the Framer Updates page. Seeing the consistent speed at which the team at Framer was launching and updating features and the impact of these updates on the product experience sealed the deal.

Migrating to Framer

Late last year, Superhuman started their migration to Framer with a few simple, low-risk pages. Once they had tested their workflow with these pages, they began work on the rest of their site.

With a deadline of 3 months to migrate their entire site to Framer, all teams were a go to complete the design and start building. There was a ton of iteration, and the team sometimes felt like they were “building the plane while flying it”. Framer’s granular roles and permissions ensure that the right people have access to the parts of the site that they need to update – without risking any accidental changes to content or copy.

Had Superhuman not have been using Framer, they wouldn’t have been able to handle the animations and effects in-house. Having Framer’s dedicated support team on hand was invaluable to the team at Superhuman. They were there to jump on calls and jump into their designs in the Canvas to help the Superhuman team hit their deadline.

The team hit their deadline of 3 months from signing up to launch, and since the new site has launched, they’ve seen improved conversion across the site and improved SEO. This is down to the combination of Superhuman's top-notch marketers, developers, and designers and the ease of use and speed that Framer provides them with. 

The compounding effect of building in Framer

One huge benefit that the Superhuman team has seen as a result of moving to Framer is the compounding effect that the tool has on the speed of their workflow. The longer you use Framer, the faster you ship new pages. Each component your team builds can be shared across other projects – essentially creating a design system in Framer for every aspect of your site.

What’s next for Superhuman? 

Now that the marketing team has control of the Superhuman site, they plan to do more. More testing, more iterating, and more shipping. Over the last few months, one designer on the Superhuman team has been working hard on building a library of components that can be reused across all of Superhuman’s pages. The need to bring in a developer to update their website is lower than ever, with designers and marketers able to handle 85% of the work taken to launch a new page.

Superhuman is in a massive state of growth and plans to expand into different countries over the next 12 months. Framer’s new native localisation feature will be hugely important in ensuring that the Superhuman team can easily translate their site and ship it optimistically for SEO of the locale they’re in.