Sharon Hwang, one of a trio of designers behind Paper, told the Financial Times that it was an unusual for a designer to create a product without knowing what the content would be.

“What’s cool about Facebook is all the content is unpredictable and generated by all the people that use it. Designing a framework for that is really interesting but really challenging,” she said.

Ms Hwang and Mike Matas, another Paper designer, joined Facebook after working at Apple, traditionally the most design-obsessed technology company. Former Apple employees are starting to join other companies hungry for designers who can bring the same polish to their mobile apps as the iPhone itself.

Paper’s designers created a tool called Origami which allowed them to quickly create and test their designs in 3D, without needing a constant back-and-forth with an engineer to bring it to life. Facebook is known for its rapid product development but usually mobile apps of Paper’s quality are not.

The third Paper designer, Brandon Walkin, said Paper was created as a coherent concept, with the team relying less on tweaking and testing user reactions than for some other Facebook designs.

Read the full article in The Financial Times here.