I conducted a short study on Slack to understand the user experience on a macro and micro level as well as gain a deeper understanding of the intersection of productivity/collaboration and communication. Despite being a fantastic product, I quickly found a number of usability issues. This post will explore the first phase of my user research case study.
Overview
I conducted my user research over two phases and over the course of three days. The objective was to gain a deep understanding of how and why people communicate and understand the deep relationship collaboration has with communication.
Phase 1 — User Interviews: To gain a deeper understanding of Slack’s product design and people’s communication behaviors, I needed to understand the role communication tools have on people’s lives. To do this, I conducted user research in the form of nine user interviews. From these user interviews, I gleaned common behavioral patterns and trends, nuances between various character types, and created a few working hypotheses. (The focus of this post is Phase 1)
Phase 2 — Usability Studies: To understand Slack’s shortcomings on micro and macro user experience levels, I needed to conduct usability studies. I did this with 6 participants. These usability studies led to a few key learnings, of which, I did a deep dive into one of them. (Part 2 of this series will explore this further).
Phase 1: User Interviews
I conducted individual user interviews either over voice chat or in person. I prepared questions to serve as a loose guideline on the sorts of topics and questions I would go over which informed me of where in their lives communication tools play a role, how participants balance their personal life from their professional life with regards to communication tools and accessibility to others, and what their motivations are with workplace communication tools. The participants were all in their mid-20’s to mid-30’s with 44% coming from non-tech fields. Some of them were early to adopt and try new technologies and software, others were self-described luddites. The following are my learnings:
Trends:
Trends are common themes that I found amongst all of the participants. These are the behaviors they all exhibited regardless of age, ethnic background, industry, and profession.
5 General Trends
- Everyone checks their phone within the first 5 actions they take to start their day. Most of them check their work email and text messages first thing in the morning to ensure nothing urgent needs their attention. A few of them mentioned that checking email is effort since it requires them to go into their phone, but with texts it’s on their home screen.
- For personal communication, people typically use SMS or a messaging app such as Hangouts or WhatsApp. Some participants mentioned using video chat (Skype/FaceTime), and a few mentioned using email to plan group outings.
One participant messaged the following to me after the user interview session:
I am literally ALWAYS on gchat (she means Hangouts). I couldn’t say that on the phone since I was at work, but I’m ALWAYS on it.
- Majority of the participants preferred having separate communication channels for personal vs professional, but, they also wanted to streamline their communication more. Incidentally, the participants that wanted to keep their personal communication tools separate from their professional communication tools would also use text messages on their personal phones to communicate with coworkers for work purposes. And all of the participants with iPhones used the default mail app which combined work and personal emails into one view.
- Email is sort of a last resort for the majority of the participants. It’s used when an answer is required where some level of research or deeper thinking is necessary. It is also used by participants when something needs to be on the record, more formal, or a file needs to be shared.
- For participants that belonged to other organizations outside of work (such as a nonprofit, or meetup group), they kept in touch via email and/or text.
5 Trends on Communication/Collaboration
- The order of preference for communicating on work related actions is as follows: in-person human interaction (physically going up to the person), instant message/chat, email, text.
- Typically, sharing files amongst coworkers is done via email or Dropbox/Google Drive. Being able to collaborate on documents, leave comments, and share files amongst colleagues is a huge pain point — and it was especially painful for participants that had team members that were distributed. It is typically done via Dropbox/Google Drive, or some sort of wiki, such as Confluence or Nexus. These tools also made the files and collaboration easier to track.
I loved the search feature in Slack. But my coworkers felt that for any important files, it should be shared through drive or email. It just seemed like for any mode of instant messaging, it doesn’t matter what tool you were using, no one trusted that a streaming mode of communication was good for searching and collaborating around files.
— Product Manager, B2B SaaS
- For participants that used Slack or Hipchat at work, they rarely used the mobile app if adoption was low in their organization for the mobile app.
I’m not logged into the mobile app much because not many of our people use it, so it doesn’t make sense for me to be logged into the mobile app that much.
-Sr. Software Engineer, Enterprise
- Email is seen as more formal and used when something needed to be written in stone, so to speak. Although there’s a preference towards more instant means of communication, email was the preferred means when something needed to be on record.
Email is if I need them to take time to think about something or research it.
— Product Marketing Manager, Event Marketing Firm
- For a workplace collaboration/communication tool to be adopted by a team or organization, there typically needed to be one person that champions it and does the leg work for setting it up and getting others to adopt it.
From a participant where there wasn’t enough adoption for a tool:
“The latest tool I tried getting people to adopt at work was actually a service called Slack, but it ended up not working out because not enough people used it on a daily basis.”
— Product Manager, B2B SaaS
From a participant where there was enough adoption for a tool:
“At work, when it came to messaging products, I started using the tool we now use as my primary source of communication. When people would Hangouts message me I would send them my response back in Slack to get them on there so they could use it. It worked.”
-Sr. Software Engineer, Enterprise
From a participant that set up the groundwork for his team to adopt Asana:
“Before I attempt to get others to adopt it, I incorporate it into my own workflow and see if it solves the problem I need it to. If it does, then I’ll do the groundwork for how the tool can be used effectively….It’s typical people are using other tools, but it’s about showing value of a product. For Asana, I would send people links on how to use certain features and sort of force people to use it — and then they started to use it.”
-Director of Customer Success, Enterprise
5 Nuances Discovered
Nuances are interesting anecdotes that have the potential to surprise, delight, or confound. They may be outliers and idiosyncrasies in behavior amongst participants, but could have deeper implications that’s worth looking into.
- One participant adopted Voxer for her team. They loved it so much that they started to use it more than Hipchat since, like HipChat, it’s asynchronous, but unlike HipChat, they felt that hearing human voice added a sense of immediacy and unlike a phone call, Voxer allowed them to refer back to a message. She felt Voxer was closer to in-person human conversation than using HipChat.
- For participants that are involved with organizations and groups outside of work, they would use email listservs to keep in touch. One participant, however, used Hangouts video and group text with a nonprofit she’s involved with.
“I’ll use video chat to chat with the founder (of the nonprofit) who’s in a different country. It’s just easier that way.”
— Buyer, Cosmetics Industry
- A participant who is on the Hangouts team at Google (and dogfoods their product), mostly uses the chat or video feature to communicate with team members that are distributed. Another participant only uses video when sharing a screen, but will use FaceTime Audio on desktop over using the phone when doing a voice call.
“For work, video is rarely needed unless I’m sharing a screen or I like the person. I use FaceTime Audio over the phone because I’m either working and have headphones in or in the middle of something. And weirdly, many of my calls require me to search for stuff.”
— Head of User Experience, Digital Agency
- For some participants, customization wasn’t a big selling point — functionality and solving a pain point were more important. For others, it was a huge deal if it meant increasing personal productivity. For two of the participants, they cared about customization for products that they lived in, but less so for products that they’ll hop into for a few minutes a day — such as Facebook and Snapchat. This is interesting because while they may not live in those products, it’s a part of their daily life.
- A participant that has Lync for instant communication at work, uses email internally for fun. Important communications internally occur in person, external communications are done via email, and when casual conversations occur with coworkers, those are done via email. This is vastly different from the behavior other participants exhibited.
“Meetings are for when there’s a topic that needs to be discussed extensively. Email, internally, is usually just for fun — like if I’m not talking about anything important and I just want to communicate with a coworker, I’ll email them.”
— Project Assistant, Real Estate Development
Three Hypotheses Crafted
- People say they want less tools, and they want their communication tools to be more streamlined between personal and professional, but they appreciate that professional is separate from personal. Perhaps the solution isn’t necessarily separate tools, but rather the psychological satisfaction of knowing that there are separate streams between the two within one experience. SMS and the iPhone email apps are used for both professional and personal communications, so people aren’t inherently against one tool for both. Slack can create a more powerful experience that makes people feel okay to integrate their personal and professional communications. In this case, any associations and organizations outside of work is being categorized as personal as well. Right now, it’s largely seen as a work-only tool, and to some, only for the engineering/product teams of an organization.
- With a tool such as Slack, it’s difficult for users to find value if others aren’t on it — in this case, the mobile app adds very little value if others aren’t using it. Slack could add value for users by guiding users on desktop and web to download the mobile app. This empowers users to quickly view notifications and messages and get on with their day rather than go into a web or desktop app.
- For Slack to be a far more valuable tool that extends far beyond the engineering/product teams in an organization, the experience of file sharing needs to be rethought in the current product.
The next post will be on phase 2, where I’ll dive into the usability studies and explore one area where Slack could improve to empower users to be more successful in their day-to-day.
Edit: Part 2, which takes a deep dive into Slack’s usability, has been published and can be found here: https://medium.com/@samihah/a-user-research-case-study-on-slack-phase-2-usability-studies-41226485447c.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Slack. I’m a product designer that just really really really loves Slack and am an avid user and admirer of their product. If anyone from Slack is reading this, how do I get my hands on a pair of those really cool socks you guys have?
