Slack&#8217;s Three-Year Makeover: From Sluggish to Slick
“I Slacked you” has been a well known phrase in the corporate town since 2014. The productivity platform indirectly benefited during the pandemic; the same time it got its last redesign. “A lot of that research from over the years factored into just the fundamental layout that we provided here. From knowing how users use the product today and what they’ve told us over the years. Both from qualitative sessions that we’ve done with user research, but then also from some quantitative surveys,” Brad Monroe, senior product manager of Slack told AIM. Slack is unveiling a substantial platform update with a completely revamped interface. By providing improved access to essential work tools, this redesigned Slack version elevates the overall user experience, offering a more streamlined, enjoyable, and efficient approach to work in today’s contemporary work landscape. Setting Boundaries The platform has not been the best communication method for user focus and deep work over the past. The internet is filled with users complaining about the platform’s nature of massive distraction. Monroe’s personal favourite part of the update is the all new activity view — a solution to the focus issue. “It’s a one stop shop for the overall application to catch up on things that require your attention, without getting distracted by all the other conversation going on in Slack that may not be really pertinent to you” he said, “Think of it like a single pane of glass”. The research team has analysed the current interface to understand ‘what the users find distracting’ and ‘the cognitive overload due to dots popping up everywhere when they open Slack’. “Though this might seem like a purely cosmetic change to the app overall, this was the culmination of architectural work that we’ve been working on for some years.” Furthermore, the platform has a ‘clicking issue’. One of the things that Monroe and his team has heard from users over the years is when they go to search results, they often may not find the first result. That involved a lot of clicking. ”For that, we are introducing the two panel design to see your results on the right. It’s taking away a lot of the friction that users face while navigating to find the right result,” he proudly revealed. No AI Interference (Yet) While Slack’s competitor Zoom struggles to clarify its own policy about training AI on user data, the former continues to opt for the ‘No genAI’ approach for its platform. “There’s not any net new AI kind of updates in the app. This update gives our existing toolset a nice home,” clarified Monroe. But he further mentioned that the iterations do set the foundation for the new services that will be launched in the future. For now, there’s three main areas of this update. First is how Slack lets users easily navigate their channels and conversations. Second, the team has worked for users to focus on what’s important, so they can knock out whatever their task is at hand during their day. Third, being able to easily find and use the essential tools that users need throughout their workday. Over the years, a variety of tools have been added in Slack except a canvas for knowledge management. Henceforth, the productivity platform will have a unified ‘Create’ menu allowing the users to create anything simultaneously. Monroe also mentioned that the team has intentionally kept some things very similar to ease that transition for users so that not everything is different. “At this point, we’ve learned a lot from that [2020] redesign, and we’re applying some of those learnings here. Like for example, we’re doing a lot of outreach to our customers ahead of time so that they know this is coming. We want to ease that transition as much as possible,” he concluded.
“A lot of that research from over the years factored into just the fundamental layout that we are providing here,” the senior product manager at Slack told AIM
Corporate messaging platform Slack is unveiling a substantial platform update with a completely revamped interface.
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Tasmia is a tech journalist at AIM, looking to bring a fresh perspective to emerging technologies and trends in data science, analytics, and artificial intelligence.