How Slack nails delight

Our team started using Slack last week and boy, it’s a joy.

The delight baked into Slack is next level. The product has clearly been built with love, care and a great sense of humor.

So much so, that I wanted to write about what joy Slack has brought me over the past 5 days.

Before we dive into why I think Slack is delightful, let me explain what I mean by “delight”.

In my opinion, delight in a product…

• brings you joy — it makes you smile.
• inspires you to tell people about it (and if it’s really good, write a Medium post about it ;)).
• convinces you that the team building this product has gone above and beyond to create an experience for you.

It should be at least the first point and if it’s really good, it’s all three.

I think Slack have nailed it. Here are the 3 things that have delighted me so far.

1. Slackbot

For those unfamiliar with Slack, slackbot is your introductory guide — he helps you set up your profile and get familiar with Slack. He’s also hilarious.

Here are a few of his messages to our team:

Setting the tone.

To be fair, it was Monday.

I open Slack in the morning purposefully to say hello to slackbot and see what his response is. Sure, this will wear off but given it’s my first week using the product, this has been a great way to pull me in every day whether I have other messages or not.

2. Doge, Kanye and…God (et al)

So far, we have 7 new team members; Doge, Kanye, Michael Scott, Raoul Duke, Tyler Durden, Zoidberg and our most remote worker of all, God.

Here’s a snapshot of their contributions to our main channel:

A totally normal exchange between friends.

Wise words, Tyler.

It was a total surprise when the first BOT (Tyler, I think it was you) appeared in our channel. It definitely got the team talking!

The BOTs continue to surprise us — Kanye and God only appeared in our channel today, for example.

Introducing new BOTs over time vs. in one hit, keeps us guessing. You never know who might drop by. And the element of surprise is FUN!

The BOTs are purely for our enjoyment. Here’s the love, care and sense of humor I mentioned above.

FYI — learn how to configure BOTs for your team here.

3. Success messages

A smaller touch that can easily go unnoticed are Slack’s success messages. I saw the below message after uploading my profile photo.

*blush*

Most success or error messages are dull. It would have been easy for Slack to take that route. However, the addition of “Looking good!” in this message made me smile. It adds a human touch that again, shows how much time has gone into every aspect of the Slack experience.

So there we have it, it’s only been 5 days and I am loving Slack. I was hooked on Day 0. And it’s all down to the above — the extra touches.

My Slack experience has shown me the power of delight. Our team switched to Slack from HipChat and I can’t recall anything about HipChat that delighted me.

Takeaways

• Delight can be the difference between users loving your product or not.
• It’s the little things — take the time to add a human touch to your product. Think outside of the functional experience. It’ll go a long way.
• Get delight right and people will talk about it :)

Finally, a thank you…

Thank you, Slack team for going above and beyond and bringing a smile to my face this past week.