Frequently Asked Questions

Design Principles & Product Experience

What are Hygraph's core design principles?

Hygraph's design principles include: Context is king (designing for engineering teams, content creators, and businesses), Keep it simple (prioritizing ease of use and respecting users' time and money), Clarity through consistency (providing familiar, inclusive, and honest experiences), Take ownership (end-to-end involvement from planning to production), and Bias for action (encouraging calculated risks and rapid iteration). These principles guide all product decisions and ensure functionality and rationality in design. Source

How does Hygraph's design process work?

Hygraph's design process emphasizes collaboration, transparency, and continuous iteration. Designers share ideas early and often, invite feedback from public channels, ask questions to avoid assumptions, and iterate based on real user testing. This approach ensures alignment, reduces risks, and builds momentum for product improvements. Source

Who are the main user personas Hygraph designs for?

Hygraph designs products and services for three major user personas: engineering teams, content creators, and businesses. Each persona has unique expectations and needs, which are addressed through tailored design and product features. Source

Features & Capabilities

What are the key features and capabilities of Hygraph?

Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a user-friendly interface. Key capabilities include rapid content delivery, streamlined workflows, and support for integrations with platforms like Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, AWS S3, Cloudinary, and more. These features enable businesses to create impactful digital experiences efficiently. Source

What integrations does Hygraph support?

Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. For a full list, visit the Hygraph Integrations page.

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content management and delivery. Learn more at the Hygraph API Reference.

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, ensuring rapid distribution and responsiveness. This leads to improved user experience, higher engagement, reduced bounce rates, and increased conversions. For more details, visit this page.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers enterprise-grade security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more details, visit the Hygraph Security Features page.

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the pricing page.

Use Cases & Customer Success

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. Source

What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Hygraph's case studies span industries such as food and beverage (Dr. Oetker), consumer electronics (Samsung), automotive (AutoWeb), healthcare (Vision Healthcare), travel and hospitality (HolidayCheck), media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. Source

Can you share specific customer success stories?

Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available on the Hygraph product page.

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph's customers include Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more details, visit the Hygraph Case Studies page.

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, clunky content creation), financial pains (high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache and OpenID integration issues). Solutions include an intuitive interface, GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and scalability. Source

How does Hygraph solve pain points for different personas?

For developers, Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators and project managers, it provides an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders, Hygraph lowers operational costs, accelerates speed-to-market, and supports scalability. Solutions are tailored to each persona's unique challenges. Source

What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?

KPIs include time saved on content updates, number of updates without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more details, see the Hygraph blog on CMS KPIs.

Support & Implementation

What support and training does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel. Customer Success Managers are available for onboarding and ongoing support. Source

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use resources like documentation and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Documentation, Top Villas Case Study

What customer service is available after purchasing Hygraph?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users can access documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel for ongoing assistance. Source

Documentation & Resources

Where can I find Hygraph's technical documentation?

Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering all aspects of building and deploying projects.

Where can I find the Hygraph blog?

You can visit the Hygraph Blog for news, developer tutorials, and essential guides to content modeling.

Velocity at Scale: Join the Launch of Hygraph’s Latest AI Innovations

How we design at Hygraph

These principles are considerations and guidelines that help us make appropriate decisions at Hygraph.
Darshan Gajara

Written by Darshan 

Oct 09, 2023
How we design at Hygraph

Design differs from art because it must always be functional and rational. We're working persistently to solve problems for the business and our users. These principles are considerations and guidelines that help us make appropriate decisions.

#1. Context is king

We design products and services for three major user personas – engineering teams, content creators, and businesses. They all have varied set of expectations and understanding of our product. In order to cater to their needs, it's always important to ask who we're designing for and how it would help them solve their problem.

#2. Keep it simple

When tasked with a problem, default to simplicity. We don't want to reinvent the wheel where it isn't required but we will always strive to make better pots. Stick to the basics, provide ease of use and respect our customers' time and money.

#3. Clarity through consistency

Work in systems, follow best practices and guidelines. Provide a familiar experience to the user, don't make them think. Aim to create a simple, functional, inclusive and honest design.

#4. Take ownership

Take ownership of your work. Be involved in the end-to-end experience from planning to production. Your job as a designer is never done until the feature or project is alive.

#5. Bias for action

We encourage action over speculation. Move fast and fix things as you go. Most actions can be reversed and do not need extensive study; take calculated risks.

#Our design method

Over time, with practice and experience, we've learned a few things that work for us when designing. These are the core fundamentals of the way we design at Hygraph.

1. Share early, share often

Great design happens in collaboration. Share your ideas and sketches with the team before they're done. Allow them to collaborate with you, provide feedback, and move forward together, faster. Ideally, you shouldn't spend more than a day without sharing anything with the team. This also helps with alignment and building a common understanding.

2. Be transparent and invite feedback

Work in the open, share your work in the public channels and create an environment where anyone can share feedback with you. This not only helps in collaboration but also makes your work visible.

3. Don't assume, ask questions

Curiosity never killed the cat. Ask questions with an open mind and avoid making assumptions. Stay curious and keep learning.

4. Iterate, iterate, iterate

A digital product is never done. We can always make improvements. Take small bets, test them with real users and execute on your learnings. This is a great way to reduce risks and build momentum.

Headless by Design

Visit the Hygraph Design Team's website

Blog Author

Darshan Gajara

Darshan Gajara

Darshan is a designer & maker living in Berlin, currently leading the design team at Hygraph. He also maintains Product Disrupt, writes stories about design & travel, interviews creators, mentors designers, and curates design resources.

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