Thankful For Slack

A day before Anthony D. Paul started at idfive he already had an inbox of more than 60 unread messages from the team. With the majority of the emails being unurgent and about general team awareness (what projects just finished, who’s coming in late, ect.), Anthony’s most time-sensitive messages were buried somewhere on the losing end.

As our Director of User Experience and a self-driven problem solver, ‘ADP’ immediately introduced Slack: A communication and collaboration app that’s sweeping business teams worldwide. Within hours and without arm-twisting (probably because we’re geeks about new tech), everyone on the team began tailoring their profiles and creating new channels — both project-specific and casual. This ease-of-onboarding and inherent desirability are what’s fueling Slack’s success across industries.

With months of Slacking now under our belt, we at idfive have seen a considerable improvement in communication efficiency and a better prioritization of messages and notifications across all of our project management tools. The fast-flying jokes deployed through our communal channels came as an added cultural bonus.

Here’s what we like most about our buddy Slack:

1. Ability to create channels with different purposes: Unlike email, Slack lets you create multiple channels for particular groups. They can be specific to a project or a team, they can be communal and inspiration (#Good-reads, #Brand-inspiration), they can be office themed (#Who’s-hungry, #Monday-Breakfast), or in idfive’s case, they can be a direct mainline to agencies leaders (#Ask-Mandres). All of these channels serve a purpose and cater to the communication needs of specific ‘fivers. If they don’t, then they fall flat. Like natural selection.
2. Ability to mute or de-emphasize certain channels: A skeptic to innovation might ask how this is different from modern Instant Messaging. One answer is Slack’s ability to curb invasiveness — while your IM box pops up every time someone in the building (who may be unaware of how busy you are) wants to send you a deadline alert or silly YouTube video, Slack allows you to disable certain channels and check them at your leisure. This way instead of having to be interrupted with every little message, or ignore the whole communication process altogether, you can be alerted by what’s most urgent only.
3. How it unified and replaced decentralized texting and instant messaging: Slack eliminated all of the redundant, distracting lines of online communication we had picked up in the office. Before we had people talking over various IM platforms, each with their own cumbersome form of group chatting, as well as people texting and emailing time-sensitive messages after office hours. With Slack we have everyone talking and collaborating through one platform no matter where you are or what device you’re on. We still use email of course, just much less.
4. Native integration with our tools and processes: If code has been updated in Beanstalk or if bugs have been updated in Bugify, Slack immediately sends an alert to particular channels. Also, files can be shared from Dropbox and Google Drive, and when uploaded can be viewed within Slack. General files up to 1GB can also be uploaded, making Slack a very useful place to pass around drafts and screenshots.
5. Ambient awareness and team closeness: Perhaps most importantly Slack allows us all to stay aware of the companies work and build culture without excessive meetings and late nights. For example:

• Remote workers and new mothers on leave can keep tabs on virtually all in-office occurrences.
• Channels can be made to announce when someone has to leave the office unexpectedly.
• Individual team members on particular projects can remain aware of project phases even when they’re not currently tasked, minimizing overhauls and uncooperative design to dev hand-offs.
• Specific channels can be used to share web design, web development, media research and general, marketing related content.
• A panoply of quirky functions, including a Slack Bot you can program to respond to certain words that are chatted, and a /giphy generator that pulls from the unsurprisingly expansive/weird world of internet-housed pop culture.

Within just a few months everyone at idfive has become totally comfortable with Slack. It’s efficient communication channeling, tools tailored to marketing and advertising teams, and general quirkiness (as opposed to corporate-y-ness) make it a lovely app that we’re excited to see grow.